Welcome back to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
Throughout the rest of July and August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five recommendations for shows worth seeing, plus brief round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, which kicks off in a little over a fortnight’s time, please do forward.
In case you missed it, here is the last issue of The Crush Bar from two-and-a-bit week’s ago, featuring a range of festival experts - including producer Francesca Moody, comedy critic Brian Logan and Fringe Society honcho Chris Snow - answering readers’ questions on everything from flyering tactics to favourite cafes.
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.
Plenty of outlets have already published lists of shows worth seeing: here is one from Mark Fisher in The Guardian; here is one from Tristram Fane Saunders in The Telegraph; and here is one in The Stage, to which I contributed five picks.
Natasha Tripney has also done a round-up of where you can catch some exciting Fringe-bound shows elsewhere if you can’t make it to Scotland this summer.
WhatsOnStage has done a list of the funniest show titles in the programme, the best of which is undoubtedly Putting The Ass In Brass, which you can catch at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall during the final week, should you wish to.
WhatsOnStage Editor Alex Wood has also chatted to Fleabag and Baby Reindeer producer Francesca Moody about how she is doing things differently with her pop-up venue Shedinburgh on The WhatsOnStage podcast…
This will be the last August with the Edinburgh TV Festival co-existing alongside the Fringe, with the event set to relocate to Manchester next year, organisers citing both the cost of staging and the cost of attending the festival as reasons. Here is The Herald’s Brian Ferguson on why that is “a significant blow.”
The latest episode of A Sense Of Direction, the quarterly podcast I produce and present for Stage Directors UK, features directors Jon Brittain and Jess Lazar discussing the practical and professional challenges of the festival…
Some local news: there was a fire in the Debenhams building earlier this month and a stretch of Princes Street will be closed to both traffic and pedestrians for at least the first few days of the festival as a result, so expect disruption. Buses are being diverted and trams from the airport are terminating in the West End, with no service currently running to Newhaven. There is more info here in The Herald.
For more local news during the Fringe - and outwith it - then I heartily recommend subscribing to Michael MacLeod’s newsletter the Edinburgh Minute.
Milly Sweeney’s debut play, the 2024 winner of the St Andrews Playwriting Award, premiered at Pitlochry Festival Theatre last May, blew me away, and subsequently earned Sweeney one of The Stage’s Debut Awards and the Best New Play prize at the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland, which I was delighted to present her with at the Citizens Theatre a few weeks ago.
The play follows two twenty-somethings - pot-wash Harris and art student Esme - through several months of mental turmoil as they pinball around Glasgow, never meeting, save for one fleeting, fateful encounter late at night on a bridge over the Clyde, around which their stories pivot like a fulcrum. In my five-star review for The Stage, indulging my trademark love of alliteration, I called it “a dynamic staging of a devastating debut about depression, desperation and connection.”
Now, finally, Water Colour is getting another life. Directed by Sally Reid, and starring Molly Geddes and Ryan J Mackay, it runs in Traverse 2 throughout the Fringe. You can get tickets via the button below.
Sam Ward, who makes work with producer Rhian Davies under the moniker YesYesNoNo, has been a regular presence at the Fringe for nearly a decade with his subtle, slippery storytelling shows that playfully mess with the relationship between performer and audience: 2017’s Five Encounters On A Site Called Craigslist; 2017’s the accident did not take place; 2022’s we were promised honey!; 2024’s Nation.
Ward makes uncanny, unsettling and provocative work in the vein of Tim Crouch, and he is back this year with As Far As We Know, a swift and surreal fable about a woman on a journey to understand some mysterious holes that appear in her garden, offering “a panoramic view of our contemporary world” of “data-centres, financial, speculation, dictators and digitalism.”
Written and performed by Ward, with dramaturgy from Nathan Ellis (work.txt, Instructions) and Clara Potter-Sweet (Landscape (1989), Ways Of Knowing), and supported by the New Diorama Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre and HOME, it runs at Summerhall all festival. You can read my 2022 chat with Ward here and get tickets via the button below.
Campaigning company LUNG make vital verbatim theatre that packs a powerful punch. 2018’s Trojan Horse thrillingly tackled the thorny topic of alleged radicalisation in predominantly Muslim state schools in Birmingham, while 2019’s Who Cares was a hugely moving snapshot of the traumatic lives of young carers. Both repurposed real people’s words into the mouths of actors to extraordinary effect.
Woodhill, which focuses on three male suicides at a failing prison outside Milton Keynes, is a bit different. Verbatim dialogue is voiced by actors over Sami El-Enany and Owen Crouch’s pulsating soundscape, dictating and driving the movements of four dynamic dancers on stage. The result is a truly unique piece of theatre, as galling as it is galvanising. Seriously, be warned: it is brilliant, but not an easy watch.
Written and directed by Matt Woodhead, Woodhill first ran at the Fringe three years ago, and returns this year, to ZOO Southside, at the start of a national tour that lasts until November. You can get tickets via the button below.
In 2017, Maddie Rice starred in perhaps the most famous Edinburgh Fringe show of the century, taking over from Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the festival return of Fleabag. The following year, Rice had her own hit with Pickle Jar, a hard-hitting but hilarious solo show about a young teacher.
This summer, she is back after an eight-year hiatus with new show Goodbye Dandelion, a storytelling show with songs following an unlikely friendship between two women, one 30, one 87, and exploring life, death, and the lessons different generations can learn from each other.
Directed by Katie Pesskin and featuring live music performed by Rice’s brother Marcus, AKA Hungry Tapes, Goodbye Dandelion arrives at the festival after preview dates at Soho Theatre and The Free Association, and as the inaugural recipient of Underbelly’s new Futures Fund Award. It runs at Underbelly Cowgate all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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In the near future, two female astronauts – one an expert pilot, one a brilliant scientist – are stuck on a failing spaceship on its return journey to an earth ravaged by climate change. They carry with them a potential panacea for the planet’s problems – but they might never get there.
That is the premise of this feminist sci-fi thriller from New Zealand based writer-director Luke Thornborough, which unfolds in real-time over an intense hour, exploring the climate crisis, the silencing of female voices in STEM, and more. It premiered at Auckland Fringe Festival in 2020, picking up the Best Theatre Award, toured New Zealand and Australia, and arrived in Edinburgh in 2023. It proved hugely popular, returned last year, then transferred to London’s Theatre503.
This summer, the gripping yet touching two-hander returns for its third Fringe run. Co-produced by Paris-based Alchemy Theatre and Edinburgh-based Jewel Box Productions, co-directed by Thornborough and Stuart McDougall, and starring Anthea Freya Hill and original cast member Courtney Bassett, it runs in The Box – the intimate space that previously hosted hits including Ross & Rachel and Brutal Cessation – all month. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Thanks to all 5101 subscribers, to all 172 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
Your organisation can become a champion supporter of The Crush Bar, join that list, and help keep its independent coverage of theatre going via the button below.
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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