Assisted Dying and Awkward Weddings: Two New Plays Land at the Edinburgh Fringe
An 80-year-old matriarch gathers her fractured family at a remote country house, ostensibly for a birthday celebration. The real reason is harder. Vivienne Blackwood has made a decision about how her life will end — and the play built around her, Morna Young's After Party, is running at the Traverse Theatre through August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe.
The production is a world premiere co-produced by the Traverse — Scotland's National New Writing Company, founded in 1963 — alongside Paines Plough, the touring new-writing company, and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry (Traverse Theatre). It opened in Coventry on 30 July, transferred to the Traverse for its Edinburgh run from 6 to 30 August, and returns to the Belgrade from 9 to 12 September (Paines Plough). Running over two hours, the play is directed by Katie Posner and conceived alongside Alex Fthenakis. Alison Peebles plays Vivienne Blackwood (WhatsOnStage).
The play takes on assisted dying at a moment when the subject is live in Parliament. The Assisted Dying Bill, currently working its way through the UK legislative process, has kept the question of whether terminally ill people should be able to legally end their own lives in the political and public conversation. Young, an award-winning Scottish playwright, frames the debate through the prism of one family's reckoning rather than political argument (Traverse Theatre).
A few streets away at Summerhall, another family is fracturing for different reasons. Jitters, an hour-long play by Ellen Robertson, follows 32-year-old Charlotte, who is about to marry a 60-something widower — a man who also happens to be the father of her own contemporary, El (WhatsOnStage). Directed by Emily Burns, the two-hander is performed by Robertson and Charly Clive, the comedy duo known together as Britney (WhatsOnStage).
The pairing brings a track record. The Scotsman previously gave Clive and Robertson a four-star review, praising their "wonderfully infectious relationship" that "radiates warmth and mischief from the stage" (edfringe.com). Whether that same chemistry sustains a story about generational fault lines and uncomfortable unions is the question the Fringe audience will answer.
Both plays sit in the festival's sweet spot: new writing, relatively compact running times, and subject matter that meets the moment without requiring it. After Party weighs the gravest decision a family can face. Jitters asks how a family survives a less terminal but no less awkward kind of implosion. Between them, the Traverse and Summerhall are doing what the Fringe does best — giving new plays a room, an audience, and a short window to prove they belong in the wider conversation.
