2024 Edinburgh Fringe Spotlight

As the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival fast approaches, here’s a quick guide to Concord Theatrical shows for you to discover. We are delighted to continue our partnership with New Diorama Theatre and Underbelly supporting the Untapped Awards, won this year by DRUM, The Mosinee Project and Ugly Sisters. Additionally, we are excited to publish the playtext of Julia Grogan’s Playfight and present the UK premiere of Adam Rapp’s Tony Awards-nominated The Sound Inside. Discover this array of exciting and genre-breaking works below.

DRUM by Jacob Roberts-Mensah (UK)
(Drama / 2m)
As the afternoon sun hits London’s BBC Broadcasting House, photographer James Barnor encounters broadcaster Mike Eghan for the first time. Thrown together far from home, two rising Ghanaian creatives navigate their perception of identity, success, assimilation and home. Inspired by real events, this joyful and poignant play fuses storytelling, music and dance; capturing a unique snapshot of the swinging sixties.

JACOB ROBERTS-MENSAH is a Ghanaian-British writer and producer, working across theatre and audio. His play DRUM premiered at Omnibus Theatre in 2022. Credits also include the fiction podcast, DEM TIMES, produced by his company, Our Day.

The Mosinee Project by Counterfactual (UK)
(Drama / 3 actors)

Armed Communist forces have taken over; imprisoning townspeople, cutting off communication, marching through the streets with nobody to oppose them. Prices are changed, barbed wire fences erected, and the Mayor is held at gunpoint. Or so it appears. This is just how it begins. Plunging into the dawn of the Cold War and back again, the play follows the true story of a fake invasion. A fevered, darkly funny retelling, interrogating why we fear, control and tell tales about the future.

COUNTERFACTUAL is a theatre and performance company making shows that tap into the strange, complicated underbelly of contemporary life, investigating how the past and our memory of it brought us here. Created and led by Artistic Director Nikhil Vyas (Dismissed, Soho Theatre, My Life As A Cowboy, Park Theatre), Counterfactual pieces together collaborations across different disciplines, informed by the needs of the story at hand. The Mosinee Project is the company’s debut full production.

Playfight by Julia Grogan (UK)
(Drama / 3w)

Three friends grow up under an ancient tree. They’re filthy, brutal and full of hope. By turns hysterical and poignant, Playfight is a searing probe of their inner lives as they hunt for love. Proper, ugly love. As their roots sink deeper, the branches stretch higher… so they decide to climb. The play shines a vivid light on adolescent desire in a landscape of rising sexual violence.

JULIA GROGAN trained as an actor at Rose Bruford College, graduating in 2018. She joined the Royal Court Writers’ Group and went on to write her debut play, Playfight. The play won the ETPEP Playwriting Award, Papatango Award, the Theatre Uncut Award and the Women’s Prize for Playwriting. Julia co-wrote and starred in dark historical-comedy Belly Up which premiered at VAULT Festival 2020 and went onto sellout, five-star run at The Turbine Theatre in 2021. The production is in development with the RSC. Her theatre company, Dirty Hare’s show, Gunter premiered at Edinburgh Fringe 2023, and received five stars, a Scotsman Fringe First and placed her as one of The Stage’s five breakout theatre makers. Gunter transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in April 2024. Julia currently has work in development with Hat Trick Productions. She was recently the RSC Writer on Attachment and part of the Channel 4Screenwriters’ Course.

The Sound Inside by Adam Rapp (US/UK) 
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 1w, 1m)

When Bella Baird, an isolated creative writing professor at Yale, begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student named Christopher, the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways, Bella makes a surprising request of Christopher that neither knows if he can fulfill. Brimming with suspense, Rapp’s riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another. 

ADAM RAPP is the author of numerous plays, which include Nocturne (American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop), Finer Noble Gases (26th Humana Festival), Stone Cold Dead Serious (A.R.T.), Blackbird (The Bush, London), Essential Self-Defense (Playwrights Horizons/Edge Theatre), Kindness (Playwrights Horizons), The Metal Children (The Vineyard), The Hallway Trilogy (Rattlestick), The Edge of Our Bodies (36th Humana Festival), Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling (The Atlantic), Through the Yellow Hour (Rattlestick), Wolf in the River (The Flea), The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois (The Atlantic) and Red Light Winter (Steppenwolf, Barrow Street Theatre), for which he won Chicago’s Jeff Award for Best New Work, an Obie, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. He made his Broadway debut with The Sound Inside (Studio 54), which received a 2020 Outer Critics Circle Honor for Outstanding New Broadway Play. The Sound Inside was commissioned by Lincoln Center and received its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Ugly Sisters by Charli Cowgill and Laurie Ward (UK)
(Drama / 2w)

On the day The Female Eunuch is issued in America, a transgender woman in flapping draperies rushes up to Germaine Greer and says: thank you – thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls. Ugly Sisters is an operatic, heretic, parasitic and hallucinatory retelling of this very moment, of sisterhood, of all feminist history.

CHARLI COWGILL is a London-based performer and writer for stage. She graduated in English from the University of Cambridge, and has since produced work as co-lead artist in piss / CARNATION. Her credits as writer and performer include: 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals (Soho Theatre); Ugly Sisters (New Diorama Theatre, Untapped).

LAURIE WARD is a transfeminine theatremaker, based in London, producing work as one half of piss / CARNATION. Her credits include 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals (Soho Theatre); Ugly Sisters (New Diorama Theatre, Untapped).

For more recent Concord Theatricals titles at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, explore our website.