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, 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.
The tourist tax debate continues, with Pleasance boss Anthony Alderson saying that it is “kneecapping” performers. The Stage’s Katie Chambers reports here.
The tax is one of several points raised in this opinion piece from The Herald’s Brian Ferguson, which argues that Edinburgh Council, the Scottish government and the UK government are all guilty of neglecting the festivals.
I did a panel at Shedinburgh on Sunday with Tim Bano, Lyn Gardner and Miriam Attwood about working as a journalist at the festival. Lyn expands on some stuff we discussed about the importance of context when it comes to criticism here in The Stage. Oh, and it is actually okay to pester her while she is having lunch…
The Scotsman’s Jane Bradley reports here on another Shedinburgh panel about staging work at the Fringe here, at which producers agreed that, for all its flaws, the festival is still the best place to get work seen by a lot of people at once.
Fringe bosses including Tony Lankester, Nica Burns and Katy Coren have defended Amanda Knox’s right to perform at the Fringe. Katie Chambers reports here in The Stage. Now can we please stop talking about that?
My colleagues and I have been busy reviewing shows over the last few days. You can catch up with all the four-star and five-star reviews in The Stage here. Kate Wyver has also put together a good list for the Guardian. Other lists are available.
The first awards of the festival will be handed out later this week, with the first Fringe First ceremony on Friday morning. There’s more info on awards here.
In The New Statesman, Ralph Jones has interviewed Steve Bennett, founder and editor of Chortle, and “The most powerful man at the Edinburgh Fringe.”
This is your final reminder that The Crush Bar Live is happening on Thursday morning at Pleasance Courtyard’s Cabaret Bar. Tim Bano, Holly Williams, Mickey-Jo Boucher and I will be discussing the best - and possibly worst - stuff we have seen at the festival so far with the audience. Hope to see you there. Free tickets below.
Book tickets to The Crush Bar Live here
Edinburgh-based multidisciplinary company Magnetic North turned 25 last year, and celebrated by staging this odd and exquisite show at Fruitmarket Gallery. The title comes from the final lines of Uncle Vanya, but the show has little to do with Chekhov. Instead, it is an evocative investigation into heartbreak and the impulse to seek solace in songs.
Written by Nicholas Bone and co-directed with Marisa Zanotti, it focuses on several disparate characters that have each experienced some sort of romantic trauma. A lovelorn artist, a friend-zoned accountant, a lonely wife, and a repressed young woman each relay their stories in simple understated chunks, then break into song in turn, delivering soulful covers of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Orange Juice.
I saw it in January last year and was entranced, labelling it “an exquisite evocation of how longing and loneliness are bittersweetly transmuted by song” in my four-star review for The Stage. Now, it runs at Summerhall throughout the festival, ahead of a Scottish tour in September. You can get tickets via the button below.
My friend and colleague Tim Bano, who will be appearing alongside me at The Crush Bar Live on Thursday, told me today that this is his favourite show of the festival so far. Apparently, it involves exactly what is described in the show title: an Australian man called Conk (the clowning alias of Connor Dariol) singing the same three-minute song repeatedly.
“The first time you hear the song, it’s very funny,” Tim tells me. “The second time it’s quite funny, too. By the third time, you realise that the show is going to be exactly what it promises. But then the fourth time he sakes things up just a bit and it becomes funny again. By the twentieth time, the whole room is on their feet having had the most stupid, pointless fun you can have at the Fringe.”
The show won awards at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival earlier this year, and now runs at Summerhall throughout the festival. What is the song? Well, you’ll have to head along to find out. You can get tickets via the button below.
This solo show from Teesside surrealist theatremaker Scott Turnbull combines lo-fi animation, live drawing and absurdist humour into something extremely odd but totally compelling.
The convoluted framing device pitches Turnbull as the scion of a once great, now ailing family education company that tours socially conscious seminars delivered via an old-school overhead projector, with the audience cast as students at one such session. His mind keeps wandering off into a series of increasingly bizarre stories, though, which he delivers via David Shrigley-ish live drawing, gentle audience interaction, a handful of quirky songs, and plenty of puzzling charm.
I saw it at last year’s festival and loved it. You can read my four-star review for The Scotsman here, and get tickets for its return run at Summerhall via the button below.
This solo show from Gothenburg-based actor, writer and director Daniel Adolfsson focuses on Jack, a Swedish musician stranded in Edinburgh after splitting up with both his band and his girlfriend, who drifts through his days gigging in bars, singing songs about his ex, drowning in self-pity, and looking after a rescue dog he doesn’t even like.
Written and performed by Adolfsson, co-created with Charlotte Davidson, and simply staged by London-based director Lilac Yosiphon, who recently worked on Summerfolk at the National Theatre, it is a bleakly funny and movingly tender meditation on love, ambition, and how to move on after your dreams have died.
The show marks the Edinburgh Fringe debut of Nerve Creations, a company co-founded by Adolfsson and producer Davidson that has made work on stage and screen across Scandinavia and operates Teater Trixter in Gothenburg. It runs at Underbelly Cowgate throughout the festival and you can get tickets via the button below.
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Over the last fifteen years, Andy McGregor has established himself as a major force within musical theatre in Scotland. Under the aegis of his company Sleeping Warrior, he created crime caper Spuds in 2019, gig-theatre six-hander Battery Park in 2023, and environmental epic To Save The Sea in 2024, as well as countless smaller shows and Christmas productions.
Now, Sleeping Warrior is making its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe with one-man musical Crocodile Rock. Set in the seaside resort of Millport, this heart-breaking but joyous show follows a Scottish lad, Steven McPhail, through his troubled teenage years as he struggles to fit in at school, starts questioning his sexuality, then discovers his drag-queen alter-ego.
Written, composed and directed by McGregor, with dramaturgy from Fringe First winner Johnny McKnight and musical direction from Hilary Brooks, Crocodile Rock was first performed at Glasgow’s long-running lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie and A Pint in 2019, revamped for a Scottish tour in 2022, then reworked again for a pre-festival in Glasgow earlier this year. Now, it arrives at the refurbished Gilded Balloon Teviot for the full festival, with River City star Darren Brownlie taking on the central role. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Thanks to all 5176 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
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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