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 Friday’s issue, recommending a five-star two-hander, a storytelling show in a sauna, a site-specific production in Leith, and more…
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.
In a grimly predictable development, Underbelly is trialling a dynamic pricing structure at this year’s Fringe, telling artists it is about “maximising your potential return on ticket income where your sales are proving to be thriving and in high demand” and that they “hope to grow the scheme and apply it in greater measures in future years.” More here from me in The Stage.
The Guardian’s comedy critic (and artistic director of A Play, A Pie and A Pint) Brian Logan is doing a live Q&A at 1pm today. You can find it here. Brian was also good enough to contribute to The Crush Bar’s Q&A a few weeks ago…
Have questions about the Sauna Theatre? Co-founder James Grieve, who also set up Paines Plough’s Roundabout Theatre, answers them here in The Scotsman.
What about the fact that Amanda Knox, the American convicted then acquitted then convicted then acquitted of murdering Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007, is doing a stand-up show? In this interview with The Telegraph, Knox claims Kercher would have appreciated it. Her parents are not happy at all, though.
In The Stage, Lyn Gardner surveys the state of play in “Week Zero” of the Fringe, pointing out that, for all its flaws, the festival remains an extraordinary event.
Hey, Edinburgh Fringe Instagram is just a whole load of engagement farming, isn’t it? This made me chuckle, tho.
On Sunday, I’m doing a free panel at Francesca Moody’s Shedinburgh venue (along with Tim Bano, Lyn Gardner and Miriam Attwood discussing journalism at the festival and “how to get a five-star review at Fringe.” Come along.
I won’t bother you with the poster again, but consider this your regular reminder to book tickets to The Crush Bar Live. It is at Pleasance Courtyard at 11am on Thursday 13 August, and it involves me, Holly Williams, Tim Bano and Mickey-Jo Boucher chatting about the best shows we have seen with the audience. And it’s free!
Book tickets to The Crush Bar Live here
Wonder Fools is a Scottish company led by seemingly tireless theatremakers Jack Nurse and Robbie Gordon, which has previously produced delicate, distilled stagings of David Greig’s The Events, Owen Sutcliffe’s Oran and Isla Cowan’s Alright Sunshine, as well as the shows 549: Scots Of The Spanish Civil War and The Kelton Hill Fair, and the impressive participatory project Positive Stories For Negative Times.
This August, the company is back at the festival for the fourth time with its biggest production yet, a show co-created over two years with South Korean company Theater SAN that incorporates original music, storytelling and ceilidh dancing to unfold a cross-continental story that spans sixty years and three decades.
Written and directed by Gordon, Nurse, and Yoon Jung-Hwan, artistic director of Theater SAN, and performed by a six-strong Scottish-Korean cast, Tether 인연 runs in Summerhall’s Main Hall throughout the festival, having previewed at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre over the weekend. You can get tickets via the button below.
Over the last twelve years, Irish actor and playwright Eva O’Connor has staged several striking shows at the Fringe, often involving impressive feats of performance. In 2019, she slathered herself in yellow condiment for Fringe First winner Mustard. In 2023, she squeezed into a back-breaking rooster costume for Chicken. Both were brilliant.
She is not performing at this year’s festival, sadly, but her new play For Dolores is being brought to the Traverse Theatre by Irish new writing company Fishamble, following dates in Limerick, Galway and Dublin. Set in Edinburgh and Glasgow, it follows an obsessive friendship between two women, Glaswegian Mo and Dubliner Réaltín.
Directed by Fishamble boss Jim Culleton and designed by Alyson Cummins, it stars Catriona Faint and Lara McDonnell and runs in Traverse 2 all festival, after getting some glowing reviews during its Irish tour. You can get tickets via the button below.
Linus Karp and Joseph Martin are the two halves of Awkward Productions, the company behind riotous queer comedies Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story and Gwyneth Goes Skiing. Last year, they memorably got married on stage at the Fringe.
This festival, the duo are back with a new show inspired by a real incident. In 2024, Karp was the victim of a homophobic attack in Soho, in which a man beat him over the head with the handle of an umbrella. Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella retells the story of the attack, then imagines the trial that never took place.
Written and performed by Karp and co-directed by Karp and Martin, with dramaturgy from Haley McGee (who created tear-jerking sensation Age Is A Feeling), the show runs at Underbelly Bristo Square throughout the Fringe. Awkward Productions are also doing a run of Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story for the final week of the festival. You can get tickets for that here, and tickets for the new show via the button below.
Lee Minora is a Philadelphia-based writer, performer and comedian who creates bold solo shows that grapple with the unresolved issues that torment us all. She has previously performed on the Free Fringe with her shows Cheeks in 2017 and White Feminist in 2018. This year, following an eight-year hiatus from the festival, Minora is back with Baby Everything.
Developed with and directed by fellow Philly-based theatremaker Rebecca Wright, Baby Everything is a “hypochondria-filled morning doomscroll” about our insatiable, destabilising desire for instant information via smartphones and social media, which follows one woman through a day-long spiral of stress about the state of the world, her physical health, and more, incorporating Minora’s trademark talent for clowning, improvisation and audience interaction. Think Susan Sontag meets Natalie Palamides.
Minora’s show arrives in Edinburgh after two acclaimed runs in Philadelphia, one of several shows from the Pennsylvania city at this year’s festival: company Lightning Rod Special, who took the festival by storm in 2018 with Underground Railroad Game and whose artistic director Alice Yorke directed early iterations of Baby Everything, are also at Summerhall with Lions. You can get tickets via the button below.
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How do you adapt a book like Ulysses? James Joyce’s Homer-inspired modernist masterpiece is famously one of world literature’s toughest reads, with its shifting styles and stream-of-consciousness prose. Translating it onto the stage, then, presents a formidable challenge.
American theatremaker Conor Kelly O’Brien’s meta solution is to dramatize that difficulty. His five-handed play Ulysses (Of Scranton) focuses on a group of actors during their fraught final run-through of an adaptation of Joyce’s novel, slipping back and forth between their modern-day rehearsal room and the Dublin of Leopold Bloom in 1904, until the two become impossibly intertwined.
The show premiered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, last year, then ran in Ireland at County Mayo’s Ballina Art Centre. Produced by Scranton Fringe Festival, which O’Brien co-founded with Elizabeth Bohan in 2015, and the city’s New Vintage Ensemble, it now arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe, running at Bedlam Theatre all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Thanks to all 5159 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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