Traverse festival 2020 Uma Nada-Rajah

The Guardian 25 Aug 2020

This the time of year commentators like to weigh in about the big themes on the Edinburgh fringe. The festival is a cultural barometer and, after a few days of back-to-back theatregoing, you seem to get an insight into society’s most pressing concerns. Last year, for example, it was all about colonialism and its connections to misogyny, capitalism and violence.

Things this year, of course, are different, but the Traverse is gamely flying the festival flag with an online programme that captures something of the excitement of plays rubbing up against each other. Being released over the course of this week, its audio-only Breakfast Plays introduce five playwrights whose concerns extend beyond our current Covid preoccupations but can’t quite shake off a sense of apocalyptic doom. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).