Summer Fringe Highlights

Some bright stars I Found Along the Way

There’s a certain kind of work that doesn’t arrive with a press release.

You find it slightly sideways — in a message thread, a forwarded flyer, someone saying this is what I’m doing and almost apologising for it.

I’ve been collecting a few of those this week. Ideas in motion.

Tom Corradini isn’t just bringing a show to Edinburgh this summer. He’s building the venue around it.

Not branding it. Not launching it. Actually constructing it.

Tom has form for this — he ran FISICO, the Alba International Physical Theatre Festival. There’s something slightly mad about setting up your own Edinburgh space, and also completely necessary. In a landscape where everything feels temporary, someone deciding this will be the place feels quietly radical.

And heading to Brighton is Ghost Light — a Victorian ghost story in the tradition of M.R. James, playing May 4th and 10th from Orange Works.

An aspiring novelist joins the London Ghost Club seeking inspiration, and ends up investigating a haunting at an East End lodging house. What’s more interesting than the premise is the instinct behind it: that older forms still hold something we haven’t resolved. That we return to them not out of nostalgia, but because they know something.

Bloody Mary(s), from Blue Fire Theatre Company, runs at Edinburgh Fringe 7–30 August.

A whistle-stop tour of Marys across time — history, music, fragments, a drink in hand. It could tip into gimmick, but there’s something more generous in the idea: an audience invited to sit with the work, not just watch it. Songs, a cocktail, and an all-Mary dinner party. That shift — small as it sounds — is doing a lot.

Young, by Gerry Carroll, plays Brighton Fringe on Sundays throughout May — the 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th, and 31st at Laughing Horse at The Temple, 12:30pm.

Storytelling and comedy. His own life and ancient legend woven together. An ordinary life, a hero of legend — which is a good proposition for a Sunday lunchtime, and probably a better description of most lives than we’d admit.

Next to Normal, from Bare Productions, comes to Edinburgh Fringe this August.

Pulitzer Prize winner, three Tony Awards, music by Tom Kitt. A show about a family holding itself together around a grief that doesn’t quite resolve. Bare Productions are back in Edinburgh with thought provoking work.

Somewhere else, someone is writing their way into the world.

Norm Reynolds — you’ll find him at A Day Like All Days on Substack — has been walking into Toronto independent bookshops and asking: I’ve written a Toronto-centric novel, early nineties, queer — what comes to mind?

It’s a simple question, and also quite a brave one. Because it assumes there might be an answer. One bookshop pointed him toward Night Terminus by Ellis Scott. That’s how you find your people.

And then there are the quieter pieces. The ones that are waiting to be streamed.

The Shape of Things Undone sits in that space. Part of Brighton Fringe, available to listen throughout May.

It’s four in the morning. Christine — a carer, forty-something — is heating a sandwich in a microwave she has an understanding with. Upstairs, they’re opening the new wing. Speeches. Free biscuits. Down here, she’s doing the checklist.

Written by Lita Doolan, performed by Julie Broadbent — the team behind the Off West End–nominated Wyre Lady of Fleetwood — it’s an audio piece you take with you rather than go to. You choose the setting. A garden. A quiet room. A familiar walk. You sit inside it, not in front of it.

And it lingers differently because of it.

What ties all of this together isn’t genre or scale.

It’s a kind of effort. People making something happen — sometimes by building a space from scratch, sometimes by returning to an idea that wasn’t finished with, sometimes just by saying this is what I’ve got and letting it go.

Most of what’s interesting arrives that way.

It’s new ideas. In transit.

If there’s a thread to follow this summer, it might be that — not just what to see, but what’s in the process of finding you.