Welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre from Fergus Morgan.
Throughout July and August, The Crush Bar has been focused on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with twice-weekly issues featuring updates from the festival and recommended shows. Below, in case you missed it, is Tuesday’s issue.
This – a day late, sorry – is the final Edinburgh Fringe issue. The Crush Bar will then go on a short break in September, before regular service resumes in October.
Five thoughts about the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe
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The final round of Fringe First Awards were handed out yesterday morning. They went to Ohio, #Charlottesville, Philosophy Of The World, and Hot Mess.
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At the same ceremony, the winners of the Filipa Bragança Award, the Holden Street Theatres Award, the Brighton Fringe Award and the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award were given out. The first two went to Jade Franks’ Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x), the Brighton Fringe Award went to Jonny Woo: Suburbia and the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award to Beth Wants The D.
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The Stage has unveiled its Fringe Five list of theatremakers that have had breakout years at the festival: In Bed With My Brother for Philosophy Of The World, Guido Garcia Lueches and Sergio Antonio Maggiolo for Jeezus!, Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote for Hot Mess, Emma Howlett for Aether, and Holly Wilson-Guy and Kheski Kobler for DYKE Systems Ltd.
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The List Festival Awards were announced last night, too. Bebe Cave’s Christbride, Shaper/Caper’s Small Town Boys, Ryan Stewart’s Kinder, Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote’s Hot Mess, and Issy Knowles’ Body Count were among the winners.
I have seen 68 Edinburgh Fringe shows over the last three weeks, plus four Edinburgh International Festival shows. I have written 50 reviews – 30 for The Stage, 18 for The Scotsman and two for The Financial Times – and I have published twelve issues of this newsletter. I have been a judge for the Fringe First Awards for the first time, and I have chatted about the festival on Radio 4 and on three panels. And I’m exhausted.
There will be some loose ends to tie up next week, including the total ticket figures, which will be released on Monday and should tell us how big an effect those Oasis gigs had on the festival. Look out for my coverage of that in The Stage.
For now, I am going to conclude The Crush Bar’s coverage of the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe with a list of my ten favourite shows. One quick request first, though.
If you have found The Crush Bar’s coverage of the festival useful at all – if you have booked something through it, or sent it on to a friend, or had your show featured – then please think about becoming a paid supporter, or, if you represent an organisation, a champion supporter. I love publishing The Crush Bar, especially during the Fringe, and I would like to do it all over again next year. You can help.
I saw Dan Colley’s drama about an elderly Irish actor living with dementia, who believes she is still in rehearsals for King Lear and lives in an experimental care home that indulges her delusions, at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2022 and adored it. I saw it again at the Traverse Theatre at the beginning of the festival and fell in love with it all over again. It is an intelligently constructed, imaginatively staged and devastatingly moving piece of theatre about the angst of parent-child relationships, the difficulty of caring for someone with dementia, and the very nature of identity itself. You can read my five-star review of it in The Financial Times here.
Emma Howlett’s first two Fringe shows, 2023’s Her Green Hell and 2024’s Sisters Three, were both excellent, but her third, Aether, is on another level of intelligence. It is a head-spinningly smart – Stoppardian, even – theatrical whirlwind through the stories of four women obsessed with pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, stretching from Roman Egypt to present-day Cambridge, and featuring four shapeshifting performances from Sophie Keen, Abby McCann, Anna Marks Pryce and Gemma Barnett. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here.
Perhaps the most discussed and certainly the most garlanded show of the festival, Jade Franks’ autobiographical one-woman play retells a familiar story – naïve young person arrives at Oxbridge and is confused then seduced by the arcane rituals and extraordinary privilege they encounter – with refreshing style and sass. Franks, a working-class woman from The Wirral, is a thoroughly engaging performer and surely destined for great things. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here.
Producer Francesca Moody has had a good festival: her new venue Shedinburgh looks set to stay, her comedy show Garry Starr: Classic Penguins has been a big hit, and her theatre show Ohio has deservedly been showered with praise, too. Written and performed by American folk duo The Bengsons – AKA Shaun and Abigail Bengson – it is a 75-minute slice of atmospheric, autobiographical gig-theatre that meditates movingly on faith, mortality and hearing loss through lyrical storytelling, gentle humour and enchanting tunes. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here.
One of several shows tackling the topic of motherhood at this year’s festival, Madonna On The Rocks sees writer and performer Marie Hamilton explore the professional challenges and existential angst that come with having a baby in the arts industry – and ask profound questions about generational patters of behaviour – with messy flair, meta wit, and bracing honesty. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here.
Emerging musical-writing duo Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote already have one hit under their belt with 42 Balloons. Now, they have another. Hot Mess reimagines the millennia-long relationship between earth and humanity as a tumultuous love story. It is wittily constructed, slickly staged, and features some great pop tunes, plus two energetic performances from Tobias Turley and Danielle Steers. Think Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens meets Six. This is definitely not the last we will see of it.
Khalid Abdalla’s solo show Nowhere arrived late at the festival, as part of the Here & Now Showcase of work created in England, so perhaps has not had the attention it deserves. It is a thoroughly absorbing, theatrically stylish work, weaving together storytelling, projections, movement and more to explore Abdalla’s own experience of the Arab Spring in Egypt, the typecasting that has influenced his career, the way colonialism has impacted his family, the war in Gaza, and more. It sprawls but it stirs. You can read my interview with the charming Abdalla about it here in The Stage.
Windblown only ran at the Fringe for a few nights, but it had a huge impact. Produced by Raw Material and performed by celebrated Scottish singer-songwriter Karine Polwart, it used storytelling and song to tell the tale of The Old Sabal, a giant palm tree that stood in Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens for almost 200 years, until it was felled when the gardens’ glasshouses closed for redevelopment in 2021. It was a simple, stunning show, overflowing with a sense of grief, love, and what the writer Robert MacFarlane calls “deep time.” You can read my five-star review of it here in The Stage.
Comedy theatre double-act Fag Packet – Kheski Kobler and Holly Wilson-Guy made their festival debut this summer with DYKE Systems Ltd, an anarchically entertaining show about two female representatives of an American multi-level marketing scam who cannot contain their feelings for each other. It is a chaotic hour of audience interaction, meta gags, black humour and physical comedy that works as a parody of pyramid schemes, a satire of the girl-boss business world, and a celebration of uncontainable queer love. You can read my four-star review in The Scotsman here.
Theatremaking trio In Bed With My Brother’s first visit to the Fringe since 2019, this thrillingly unruly show takes the story of The Shaggs – the band made up of three sisters, who were forced to form by their father, widely dismissed as a joke in the 1970s, then achieved cult success thanks to fans like Kurt Cobain – and spins it into a caustic comment on the inescapability of the patriarchy, with a bit of help from the acclaimed actor Nigel Barrett. You can read my five-star review in The Scotsman here.
Other shows I enjoyed: Wild Thing!; SKYE: A Thriller; Fatal Flower; Chopin’s Nocturne; Tanked; Down To Chance; Paldem; Alright Sunshine; Scott Turnbull presents… Surreally Good; A Drag Is Born; Cadel: Lungs On Legs; Fly, You Fools!; Making A Show Of Myself, The Bacchae, Clean Slate, Whisper Walk, Dreamscape.
I also saw Garry Starr: Classic Penguins last night – after I had written this newsletter, hence why it is not in the above list – and it was one of the funniest hours I have ever spent at the festival. He has added an extra show at McEwan Hall on Sunday.
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The Crush Bar’s champion supporters: The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Ellie Keel Productions; The Women’s Prize for Playwriting; Premier Scotland.
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That is it for this issue. I will be back at some point this Autumn. If you want to get in touch about anything in this issue – or anything at all – just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus