Welcome back to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.
In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, containing five more recommendations…
If you want to support The Crush Bar, you can sign up as a paid supporter. Outside of Edinburgh Fringe, that gets you another email - Shouts and Murmurs, a weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more - in your inbox every Tuesday.
Theatres, companies, agencies and other organisations can also sign-up as champion supporters of The Crush Bar, which gets their name in this dedicated tab on The Crush Bar’s Substack homepage and in the footer of every Friday issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.
A quick note: most publications will start winding down their Edinburgh Fringe coverage over the next few days, but I will be sticking around until the bitter end.
I may not send out a newsletter on Tuesday, but there will definitely be one next Friday listing my favourite shows of the festival. Until then, I plan on catching as much stuff as possible, so if you know of anything fresh, strange, or fantastic that has hitherto been overlooked, then let me know by replying to this email.
The second batch of Fringe First Awards were given out this morning at a ceremony hosted by Joyce McMillan and Bryony Kimmings. They went to Amnesia, The Distance, Parasocial Activity, HAM and Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show). More details here from me in The Stage.
The List has also announced the longlists for its awards, which will be handed out at a ceremony next Friday. You can find all the details here.
It rained quite a bit on Wednesday. Some venues were forced to cancel shows due to leaks. Katie Chambers reports here in The Stage.
The Guardian’s chief critic Arifa Akbar and The New York Times’ chief critic Helen Shaw have reported on their Fringe-going adventures here and here, while Tim Bano has ranked eight shows based on how Fringe-y they are in The Financial Times: the clown funeral for Greyfriars Bobby takes the top spot.
Time Out theatre editor and sauna-hater Andrzej Lukowski has written about conquering his fears in the Sauna Theatre for Exeunt…
In The Herald, Grace Hussey ponders whether social media influencers are spoiling Edinburgh during the festival.
Every publication has cottoned on to the fact that articles listing the funniest jokes at the Fringe are extremely well read. Here is The Guardian’s iteration.
This short, sly, extraordinary show from Israel-born, Denmark-based performance artist Boaz Barkan and his company NoLands presents an macabre anatomical dissection of how our bodies carry trauma, how antisemitism has impacted Jewish people, and how the scars of the Holocaust have manifested in the modern world.
It begins with Barkan chatting about his interest in the anatomy and his allegorical theory of how we have another organ that soaks up hate and, when saturated, spreads it throughout the body. Then, over 30 minutes, he performs a disturbing demonstration of his ideas on the prone body of circus artist Joel Degerfeldt, grabbing his stomach, sucking his fingers, and flexing his legs. As he does so, he ponders profound - and, to some, provocative - allusions about his family history, the traumas suffered by Jewish people, and the genocidal crimes of the Israeli state.
It is one of the strangest, darkest, deepest productions I have seen at the festival this year - the fact that it takes place in Summerhall’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre is perfect - and the only show I have awarded five stars to so far. You can read that review in The Scotsman here, and get tickets via the button below.
This impressive solo show from Scottish writer and performer Briony Martha begins like a bad rom-com: an aspiring actor meets James McAvoy in Costa on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow (that actually happened to Martha), he gets her tickets for a play he is appearing in (Cyrano, presumably), and the pair strike up an online relationship, messaging each other incessantly on Instagram (that bit did not happen).
Or do they? As the show continues, we start to question whether Martha’s increasingly manic character is the most reliable narrator. What starts as an unlikely romance transitions, with gleefully dark humour, into a resonant and timely study of loneliness, professional frustration, and AI psychosis.
Under Megan Brewer’s direction, Martha performs her own play with enjoyably deranged dynamism, manipulating a forest of microphones into other characters in the story and chatting to a male voice (surely not the real McAvoy?) over the sound system. She deservedly won a Fringe First this morning. You can read my four-star review here in The Stage and get tickets via the button below.
In his series of shows The Living Record Collection, NYC-based cabaret artist Salty Brine takes famous albums and classic books and spins them into exuberant shows stuffed with feeling and philosophy. Previously combos include Annie Lennox’s Diva and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Led Zeppelin’s IV and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
His latest takes Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult 1998 record In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and The Diary Of Anne Frank, plus some autobiographical stuff, some truly terrible poems, and a whole load of other stuff and turns it into an imaginative meditation on the joyful thrills, unbearable pain and sheer unlikeliness of young love.
Under Max Reuben’s direction, Salty Brine performs with captivating charisma, alongside a superb four-piece band comprising his collaborator Nate Weida and a trio of local musicians. It also picked up a Fringe First this morning. You can read my colleague Paul Vale’s five-star review here and get tickets via the button below.
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is an intense and imaginative play, full of magic, angels and demons, and culminating in its diabolical deal-making protagonist being dragged down to hell. How do you stage such spectacle and surprise within the constraints of the Edinburgh Fringe?
Half Trick Theatre’s bold answer is to cast a different guest as Faustus every night, and subject them to an hour of increasingly unhinged tasks, challenges and mayhem. Unwitting performers are presented with an edited version of Marlowe’s text and asked to deliver it. Along the way, a four-strong ensemble present them with everything from vodka shots to marshmallow assaults. Created – with real care – by Caden Scott, and performed by Scott, Courtney Bassett, Alex Medland and Moira Hamilton, the boundary-breaking show first ran at the Fringe in 2024, returned last August, then made an award-nominated appearance at Brighton Fringe in May.
Now, The Faustus Project is back at the Fringe for the third time, running at Underbelly Cowgate now the Edinburgh-based Kiwi company’s new show Waiting For Wonka has concluded its run at Gilded Balloon Patter House. Previous Faustus performers include comedian Eleanor Morton, actor Pip Utton, and Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse For England creator Alex Hill. Who will be brave enough to meet Mephistopheles this year? You can find out via the button below.
This is promotional content.
A woman walks into a coffee shop. There is a mix-up with her order. She explodes. Twenty-two people witness the incident. Each of them has a different perspective on what transpired. Over an hour, all these perspectives are unfolded through drama, movement, and music.
That is the intriguing premise of Anatomy Of Survival, a new dance-theatre piece from acclaimed German-born, London-based choreographer and psychotherapist Frauke Requardt and award-winning playwright Vivienne Franzmann, whose work includes 2010’s Mogadishu and 2017’s Bodies. Designed by Hannah Clark and performed by actor Kath Duggan, dancers Neil Callaghan and Bea Bidault, and drummer Stefano Ancora, it is a precise yet playful interrogation of how our nervous systems work, of the subjective nature of reality, and more.
Conceived during a residency co-run by the Royal Court Theatre and The Place, Anatomy Of Survival first ran at The Place and Shoreditch Town Hall last year and now arrives in Edinburgh at Dance Base for the final week of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
This is promotional content.
Thanks to all 5184 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.
The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; Ellie Keel Productions; The Women’s Prize For Playwriting
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That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus
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