We’re excited to be working with Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International to support eight Welsh performing arts companies to present their work at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival.
The Fringe - held in Edinburgh from 4 - 28 August 2017 - is a huge opportunity for Wales’ performing arts companies to present their work to new audiences and to gain international recognition for their work.
The Wales in Edinburgh programme features eight productions from Wales that represent the very best of theatre, new writing, site-specific work and contemporary dance, reflecting the breadth and diversity of the performing arts in Wales.
The programme includes two, new, one-man shows with very different takes on contemporary Welsh life; Dirty Protest return to the Fringe with Sugar Baby, a new comedy by Alan Harris about a small-time Cardiff drug dealer, while Mr & Mrs Clark’s (F.E.A.R.) uses childhood memories and public information films to examine the fragility of men’s mental health and ask how safe – or not – the world wants us to feel.
Three other plays will transport audiences back to 20th Century Britain; The Other Room’s Seanmhair, another new work, written by Hywel John, is a brutal, beautiful tale of two children who meet by chance in 1950s Edinburgh. Pontardawe Arts Centre’s The Revlon Girl by Neil Docking, with its all-female cast, tells the true story of the grieving mothers of Aberfan, in the months after a colliery tip collapsed in 1966, killing 116 children, finding solace in the unlikely company of a beauty product sales rep. And Flying Bridge Theatre’s production of Stephen MacDonald’s classic Not About Heroes looks at the friendship between WWI poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, 100 years after they met.
The remaining three productions will also appear as part of the British Council Showcase 2017; the single biggest opportunity for UK theatre companies to introduce their work to international promoters. These include National Dance Company Wales’ Folk and Profundis; two very distinct, short dance pieces – Folk elegiac and pastoral, Profundis full of wit and postmodern winks – that show the company’s dancers at their very best. Seagulls by Volcano Theatre will be a dramatically reimagined staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull, performed in the nave of a derelict church in Leith, whose chancel will be flooded for the performances. And Caitlin by Light, Ladd & Emberton is an intimate, violent dance piece in which Dylan Thomas’ wife, Caitlin, steps out of her husband’s shadow only to find herself inexorably drawn back in.
Full details on all eight productions can be found below.