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…
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ACE has donated £80k to “kickstart” next year’s Keep It Fringe Fund, which was vastly depleted this year after UK government funding that sustained it in 2024 and 2025 ended. The ACE money is only available to artists based in England, but the Fringe Society is fundraising for more. My report for The Stage is here.
Shows Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge, House Fly, Stanislavski Can’t Save Me From The Apocalypse, and Ethan and Gigi present The Movement were recognised at the first round of The Besties on Saturday, while Eva Peroni picked up the Emerging Talent Award and Xhloe and Natasha won the Fringe Legend Award.
At Summerhall, the first wave of Bragi Award winners includes Nesting, Turn Your F*cking Phones Off, Sand and, at the Traverse Theatre, For Dolores.
Edinburgh Art Festival has laid on a free daytime shuttle bus between Queen Charlotte Street in Leith and St Andrew Square in an attempt to alleviate the travel chaos caused by the fire on Princes Street. More here.
Lyn Gardner is not having a great festival. In her weekly column in The Stage, she confesses that she has seen a lot of “very, very average work” and worries that the strictures involved with staging shows at the Fringe are eroding the festival’s “bedrock” of radical, risk-taking work.
A performer drinking piss, a man singing the same song over and over again, shows in saunas: Holly O’Mahoney reports on the rise of “extreme theatre” at the Fringe in iNews.
A show from Amanda Knox, a musical about January 6th, a comedy about a school shooting: in The Scotsman, Jane Bradley asks festival bosses about the limits of free speech at the Fringe.
In this superb and sweaty one-man play, writer and performer Ben Norris (a regular on The Archers and co-creator of The Choir Of Man) fictionalises his adolescent experiences as an elite long-distance runner in thrilling fashion. It is almost as impressive as the 30-minute 10k he clocked in May 2012.
Produced by Grace Dickson, Nic Doodson and Global Creative, the show sees Norris play Chris, a Nottinghamshire teenager who discovers a talent for running, becomes obsessed, and graduates through event after event to the cusp of international attention, before his nascent athletic career is cruelly cut short.
Few shows dramatise the euphoria and despair of sport as well as this. The text is sparse, lyrical and witty. The staging from Locascio is slick and intense. And Norris captivates, spending a good chunk of the hour jogging on a treadmill, and the rest of it clambering around the metal climbing frame that surrounds it. One of the performances of the festival? It is in the running. You can read my four-star review in The Stage shortly and get tickets via the button below.
Everyone remembers lost loved ones differently. That is the central theme of this moving new American musical from Jonathan Larson Grant recipient Andy Roninson and Sean McVerry, which sees Roninson ponder the premature death of his high school bandmate Kyle and confront the fact that his perception of his pal differs from everyone else’s idea of him.
Over a fluid 75 minutes of gig-theatre, Roninson reflects on his teenage friendship with Kyle and on the disorienting days that followed his death at the age of 21, with the help of an imaginary iteration of Kyle himself, played by McVerry. It isn’t perfect (the show does not sufficiently distils its meditations into tangible drama) but Roninson’s writing is clever and neurotic, the seven-strong ensemble is excellent, the staging from directors Lonny Price and Matt Cowart is imaginative, and the songs are superb, particularly this one.
This is the first the UK has seen of The Real Kyle McCarren, but it seems unlikely to be the last, given the attachment of Operation Mincemeat producers Avalon. It is well worth catching it now, though, and not just so you can boast that you caught it in an early iteration. You can get tickets via the button below.
Could this be Elf Lyons’ year? The Gaulier-trained actor and comedian has spent a decade creating weird, amusing and utterly original shows, each one completely different from the last, from her ridiculous 2017 reworking of Swan Lake, to her Stephen King-inspired 2022 horror-comedy Raven, to her acclaimed 2024 equine experiment Horses.
This year, in perhaps her most personal show yet, Lyons transforms into a hysterical mid-century, mid-Atlantic actress to explore her recent struggles with romance, relationships and self-confidence. Other stuff (an operatic rendition of the absurd things men have said to her, some impressive lip-syncing, and a load of references to Apollo 13) is intricately layered throughout.
It is sharp, strange, subversive, cleverly constructed, brilliantly funny and ultimately extremely moving, and it is one of the buzziest shows of the Fringe this year. Lyons was nominated for the Comedy Award nine years ago. She seems a strong contender for the big prize again this festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
What do you do with all the rage? That is the question at the heart of this gripping new one-woman play from Edinburgh-based writer and producer Corinne Salisbury, which follows Liane, a forty-something woman, single mother and survivor of domestic abuse, as she tries to find ways to reclaim power after a real-life encounter with the manosphere, while her ten-year-old daughter starts to suffer from misogynist bullying.
Inspired by dramas about the darker sides of motherhood, like Frances Poet’s Gut, plus series including Bad Sisters and I May Destroy You, the play is a blackly comic drama that interrogates the limits of empathy, the need to protect our children from harm, the temptation to meet violence with violence, and what happens when that impulse goes too far.
Produced by Salisbury’s company Rupture, which is also behind These Are Our Neighbours at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre in October, directed by Jo Rush, and performed by Zoe Hunter, Slayers was first aired at a Summerhall Surgeries scratch night in March and now returns for a full festival run at Assembly George Square Studios. You can get tickets via the button below.
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This one-person spoken-word poem-play from writer and performer Martha Godber takes place over the course of one night, following a young working-class woman from her stressful shift as a care worker for elderly people, through an eventful evening out in Hull, and back again.
Inspired by interviews with young carers around the country, by the hard-hitting work of Alexander Zeldin and James Graham, and by a frustration at the lack of northern female voices on stage, it contemplates the pressures and joys of contemporary working-class life in rapid rhythmic rhyme, backed by an infectiously energetic soundtrack of Dua Lipa, Raye, and more.
Produced by the John Godber Company (e prolific playwright is Martha’s dad) and directed by Millie Gaston, the show arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe after premiering at York Theatre Royal in May, running at Pleasance Courtyard all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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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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