Six Stories Worth Crossing a City For New writing at C ARTS, Edinburgh Fringe 2026
There is a particular kind of conversation that only happens at the Edinburgh Fringe. Not the ones in the bars, though those matter too. The ones that happen inside a small room, between a performer and an audience, when something true gets said and the air in the room changes.
C ARTS has been creating those rooms for thirty-five years. This August they return with a programme that reads less like a season brochure and more like a map of what human beings are currently trying to understand about themselves. New writing is everywhere in it — not as a category or a strand, but as the natural consequence of artists who needed to say something and found a form to say it in.
Here are six of those stories. And a reason why, if you make work yourself, you might want to sit in the room when they’re told.
1. Jonny Forever — Thank You, F*ck You and I’m Sorry
Jonny Forever built a debut album in the wake of his father’s death. Then he built a show around it. One man, his music, and the full volatile mess of grief, love and inherited damage.
This is what new writing does at its most direct: it takes the thing you couldn’t say at the funeral and finds a stage for it. Jonny isn’t performing distance. He’s performing proximity — to his father, to himself, to everyone in the room who has ever stood at the edge of a relationship that ended before it was finished.
If you make autobiographical work, or have ever wondered whether your own story is enough, sit in this room and find out.
C aquila | venue 21
2. Noah Xavier — Brick
An arrested protester delivers a monologue to an unconscious cellmate who cannot respond.
That constraint — one voice, no reply, an audience that becomes the only witness — is a masterclass in what a solo show can do. Left for Dead Theatre, supported by BoonDog Theatre, have found in this premise something both hilarious and quietly devastating. The cellmate’s silence makes everything the protagonist says more exposed. More true.
New writing often works like this. The formal limitation becomes the emotional engine. If you’re a writer wondering what shape your next piece should take, Brick is worth watching for its architecture alone.
C aurora | venue 6
3. Jiayi Chen — Nüshu: Written for Her, On Her, By Her
Nüshu is a writing system created by women in rural China — a secret script developed so that women could communicate with each other outside of male literacy and surveillance. An entire language built in the margins.
Jiayi Chen, award-winning Edinburgh-based writer, director and performer, has built a piece around this history that is also a piece about every form of expression that has ever had to hide itself to survive. This is new writing with deep roots — which is the best kind. It understands that telling a contemporary story sometimes means going back a very long way to find where it starts.
C aurora | venue 6
4. Winnie Stack — @Jenna
An obsession with Pam from The Office becomes, accidentally, a roadmap to self-understanding.
This might be the sentence of the Fringe. Because what Winnie Stack is writing about — the way we find ourselves reflected in fictional characters, the way fandom becomes a kind of self-investigation — is one of the most contemporary experiences there is, and almost nobody is making theatre about it with this kind of directness.
New writing doesn’t have to reach for grand themes. Sometimes the most universal thing is the most specific thing. The parasocial relationship. The parasocial self. The version of you that only exists when you’re watching someone else.
C aurora | venue 6
5. Cereal Entrepreneur — The Music Firm & Queensboro Bridge Productions
A mother with Alzheimer’s mishears the word “serial” and tries to help her son in entirely the wrong direction.
Comedy about dementia sounds like a tightrope and it is — but the best new writing walks tightropes because that’s where the most interesting things happen. The premise here is a gift: the misunderstanding becomes a metaphor for every conversation between a parent and child where words arrive but meaning doesn’t quite. The humour is the mechanism through which something much more tender gets said.
If you write comedy and wonder whether it can carry weight, this is worth your time.
C aurora | venue 6
6. Square Pegs — 1. Empty Sky
Memories. Tape recordings. The stories we tell to make sense of the impossible.
Macready Theatre Young Actors’ Company return to C ARTS with a brand new piece that starts with a simple question every new writer eventually faces: how do we narrate the things that don’t have endings? The tape recording as a device — preserved voice, replayed moment, the past made present — is one of theatre’s oldest and most reliable tools. What matters is what Square Pegs have chosen to preserve.
Young writers making work about memory and loss deserve particular attention because they’re working on something that will only deepen with time. Catch this one early.
C alto | venue 40
A few more worth your attention
Love in the Cracks from Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama asks what happens to the bond between a dying mother and her daughter when AI enters the room — one of the most urgent questions new writing can currently address. Feral from Chile’s Josefina Cerda is a vocal-sound performance about the body, desire, and what gets called pleasure and what gets called transgression. Bathroom from UK and China-based Limpid Theatre takes a couple arguing in a single room and finds an entire cosmology of love and collapse inside it. And @Jenna aside, if you want to understand how identity writing is evolving right now, Little Pink Dress — Joey Jennings’s country-rock opera about gay culture, generational trauma and his own younger self — is the other piece to see.
Why any of this matters if you make work
New writing is not a genre. It is not a category for festivals to tick. It is what happens when an artist decides that something needs to be said and that theatre is the right place to say it.
Every piece in the C ARTS programme this August began with that decision. The weight of a father’s death. A secret women’s language. The word “serial” misheard by a mother who is disappearing. A protester talking to someone who cannot answer. These are not theatrical premises. They are human experiences that became theatrical premises because someone decided they mattered enough to share.
If you are an artist who has a story and isn’t sure it’s enough — this is the programme to walk around in for a week. Not to copy what you see, but to feel what happens in the room when someone tells the truth and the audience recognises it.
That recognition is what new writing is for.
C ARTS runs throughout the Edinburgh Fringe, August 2026, across three city-centre venues:
C aurora | venue 6 | Lauriston Halls, 28 Lauriston Street C aquila | venue 21 | Roman Eagle Lodge, 2 Johnston Terrace C alto | venue 40 | Quaker Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace
Full programme, tickets and booking at CtheArts.com
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