Preview > Fringe Firsts: First and foremost
Fringe Firsts: First and foremost
By Andrew Eaton
Published: 14/8/2009
East 10th Street
Arts editor Andrew Eaton introduces our first week of 2009 Fringe First winners, and invites you to join us at our final awards show on Friday 28 August at the Assembly Rooms
Approximately 385 shows at this year’s festival are eligible for our Fringe First awards, which have been recognising outstanding new stage writing premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe for over three decades now.
Over the course of this month, our team of critics will do their utmost to see all of these shows. We’ll be announcing more winners in the newspaper next Friday, 21 August, and on Friday 28 August, when the final week’s winners will receive their prizes at our glitzy public awards ceremony, Scotsman Fringe Awards. We’ll also be announcing the winner of this year’s Carol Tambor Award, which takes one Fringe show each year to New York (see feature, right) and the Holden Street Theatres Award, which takes one show each year to Adelaide.
Do join us on 28 August. This year’s Awards will feature live performances by the brilliant chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan (see page 3) and some of this year’s Fringe First winners. We’ll be revealing more of the line-up next Friday. If you’d like to come along, you can claim free tickets by filling in the form at the bottom of this page and taking it along to the Assembly Rooms box office on George Street.
Meanwhile, here are this week’s Fringe First winners, our first of 2009. We highly recommend them all.
Orphans
Dennis Kelly’s new play for the Traverse is a beautifully structured two-hour drama that begins when a London couple’s candlelit dinner is shockingly interrupted by the arrival of a blood-soaked relative. As it becomes clear that his original story – that he was helping a wounded man – is a lie, an ugly wedge is driven between them.
Traverse, various times, until 30 August.
Internal
Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed are back with a sequel of sorts to their extraordinary 2007 show The Smile Off Your Face. Already one of the most talked-about shows of this year’s festival, Internal takes place in a conference centre on Bread Street, where an audience of five at a time have an intimate encounter with five actors, in a show that raises uncomfortable questions about intimacy.
Traverse @ Mercure Point Hotel, various times, until 30 August.
Found
This year Dance Base is inviting Fringe audiences to “give dance a chance” with a series of shows priced at only £5 a ticket. It’s a strong programme too, and one show that is particularly worth your time is this beautiful piece performed by Christine Devaney and Michael Sherin, playing a couple in grief, dancing to a haunting soundtrack by musicians Luke Sutherland (who previously did the music for Fringe hit Venus as a Boy) and Jer Reid.
Dance Base, 8:30pm, until 16 August.
The Event
At last year’s festival, multiple Fringe First winner John Clancy went to see as many one-man shows as he possibly could. He concluded that he could do better, and we’re finding it difficult to argue with him – The Event, currently being staged simultaneously in New York and Edinburgh (where it is performed by David Calvitto) is a tour de force, whose observations are so lethally funny they’re hard to resist.
Assembly @ George Street, 1:10pm, until 31 August.
East 10th Street
A strange, beautiful and haunting piece of New York gothic, Edgar Oliver’s East 10th Street is set almost entirely in the crumbling Greenwich Village house where Oliver – actor, playwright and cult off-Broadway hero – has lived for 30 years, and describes in unforgettable detail the inner life of an old house once inhabited by an astonishing gallery of human grotesques.
Traverse, various times, until 24 August.
Crush
Paul Charlton won a Fringe First six years ago for Love, Sex and Cider, a smart, evocative play about teenage life. We’re delighted to award him another one for this tale of a married, late twentysomething couple facing a kind of early mid-life crisis when the husband begins an online affair with an attractive student teacher. See Sally Stott’s review in today’s magazine, page 7.
Underbelly, 3:15pm, until 30 August.
The Unravelling
An ordinary London comprehensive school might not be the first place you’d expect to find a Fringe First-winning theatre show, but working with playwright Fin Kennedy, the Mulberry School for Girls have created a strikingly fresh and imaginative view of their home city, which Kennedy has woven into a fantastical fairy tale where the Tube is a gateway to the underworld.
The Space @ Venue 45, 12:10pm, until tomorrow.
