This week’s Play, Pie and Pint at Oran Mor is Lynn Ferguson’s Turns Of The Tide and features BAA’s Mark McDonnell.
Sisters, Sandy and Rose claim to be identical in almost every way: Runaway winners of Butlin’s talent competition 1959, they’ve been tartan-clad singing sensation, “The Heather Belles” ever since.
For the last 20 years they’ve entertained exhaustively on Mediterranean cruise-ships. So, when they unexpectedly find themselves free to spend Christmas in Boness with their elderly mother, Shona, they pack up their mini-kilts with glee.
Just one more performance and they’ll be back on shore. Easy.
Except, no one can predict what gets left high and dry when the tide turns.
Lynn Ferguson is a writer/performer/ and general show-off, hailing from the cosmopolitan metropolis of Cumbernauld. Since leaving the metropolis, she’s worked on two Oscar winning movies, grabbed a Stage Award for Acting, hosted regularly for The Moth and appeared periodically on TV. She’s written for CBS, Pixar, three series of her own sitcom for BBC radio 4, and a cluster of plays for Edinburgh and beyond, and “The Weir Sisters” for Play Pie and a Pint, Autumn 2017
For tickets and more information, click here.
Breakfast Plays: YOUTHQUAKE – Traverse TheatreWorld premiere
youthquake noun
A significant cultural, political or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people.
Three young Scottish playwrights from the Traverse Young Writers’ group join forces with three leading British writers to explore a pressing question of our time: how can the younger generation be a catalyst for social and political change?
Paired with pieces from their professional mentors, this brave new body of work from young voices is a defiant demand to be seen as more than avocado-fuelled millennials.
Kick start your festival day with these script-in-hand readings, and enjoy a breakfast roll and tea/coffee with your ticket.
Old Enough written by Laurie Motherwell
Tonight the age of adulthood is increasing to 25. Jo is 20 and Poll is 26. What starts as a celebration of more care-free years becomes an exploration of what could be lost more than gained.
Cast includes: Joanna Tope (also appearing in Grout)
Fu**ing Millennials directed by Adura Onashile
Iain is a jaded, aging teacher in a state of personal crisis. When he blunders into an Edinburgh brothel only to find his former student Zara working there, both are drawn into a generational sparring match about work, intimacy and responsibility for the state of the world we inherit.
Cast includes: Mark McDonnell
Squall directed by Adura Onashile
Every school in Scotland has had lockdown drills for years. Drills keep students safe. Prepared for the worst-case scenario. Erin, Alice and Rob are stuck in a safe room with nothing to do but argue. About the drills. The drills that keep them safe. Because it’s always just a drill, right?
Cast includes: Mark McDonnell
The Things I Would Tell You: Words From Three Young British Muslim Women
Inspired by the anthology of the same name, three young British Muslim women explore what it is they should tell you, us, themselves and what they want to tell you, us, themselves in a mash up of poetry, discussion and song.
Cast includes: Neshla Caplan
Lurker
On the 15th June, 2017, teenage blogger Verity McAlpine disappeared. She stopped uploading videos, let her Instagram go stale and abandoned her Twitter followers. Anya Kine has a theory about the disappearance. How far will she go to uncover the truth?
Cast includes: Neshla Caplan
Further information on dates and times here
All the Lights Are On – Summerhall
Typical Emmy, to turn brain cancer into a game! Her husband attempts to care for her, even as the illness eats away the woman he knows and loves, and her mother holds faith with internet voodoo and blueberry juice. But Emmy knows optimism is a false god and cancer is a gamble: ‘Let’s see whose hair falls out when I become a cortisone monster!’ So what remains when all hope of a future fades and even the memory of a marriage evaporates? A fearless play about the limits of hope and the consolations of certainty. Produced by Start to Finnish
Performances run from 1st – 26th August (no perfs 8th, 13th and 20th) at Summerhall.
More information can be found here.