Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Playwright Kieran Hurley on his new black comedy set in a New Town brothel

Adults – the new show from playwright Kieran Hurley set in a New Town brothel – will premiere at the Traverse Theatre in August for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

A play set in a New Town brothel might appear to be one of the most topical shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe given that it will be staged just six months since sex workers in the city emerged victorious from a court battle with council chiefs.

Yet the origins of Kieran Hurley’s new black comedy Adults, which will premiere at the Traverse Theatre, go back five years.

The initial story of a jaded teacher coming face-to-face with a former pupil first saw the light of day as a half-hour “script-in-hand” breakfast show at the same venue. Now Game of Thrones star Conleth Hill is in rehearsals at the Traverse ahead of its launch as a full-length play next month.

Coneth Hill and Dani Heron in rehearsals for the Fringe show Adults at the Traverse Theatre.

Hurley recalled: “I was initially asked to write something for the Traverse around the word ‘youthquake’. I wanted to write about generations being in conflict with each other and not understanding each other.

"I chose the premise of a man showing up very nervous in a brothel in Edinburgh for the first time. He is a teacher near the end of his career and the woman who welcomes him in is one of his former students.

"It has changed loads since then, not least because it’s now 80 minutes long, there is a whole new character and most of that first piece isn’t even in the play now, but that’s where it began."

Hill stars as Iain opposite Dani Heron, who plays Zara, who is now running the brothel, and Anders Hayward, as Jay, a sex worker whose services have been booked by her old mentor, with the trio gradually discovering they have more in common than they first realised.

Game of Thrones star Conleth Hill will be appearing in the Traverse Theatre play Adults at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Hurley, who is collaborating with director Roxana Silbert on Adults, said: “Iain has worked really hard to be a good upstanding citizen.

“He’s tried to be an inspiring teacher, he has invested a lot in his identity as a teacher and he has tried to be a good family man. Yet somehow it feels like life hasn’t rewarded him the way it should have done. He’s angry at the world and doesn’t know who to blame.

“He feels a great degree of jaded resentment – having possibly suppressed a lot of himself and a lot of his own sexuality in order to be seen to be doing the right thing. He comes to the brothel in a state of crisis looking for something about who he might be, but doesn't expect to be put in contact with one of his former pupils.

“Iain more or less inspired Zara to go to university to make something of herself. But she has a bone to pick with her favourite teacher. She has really followed his ‘you can be something, do whatever you like and follow your dreams’ advice. Her arts degree is worth absolutely hee-haw. She’s wound up in a position where she feels the most viable thing for her to do is sex work.

Playwright Kieran Hurley will launch his new play Adults at the Traverse Theatre during this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

“They are waiting for the late arrival of Jay. When he shows up, a whole bunch of other things ensue. His arrival changes the rules of what’s going and things escalate in all sorts of ways.”

Although the morals of sex work are touched on, the main focus in Adults will be on the generational divide between Iain and the two 30-something characters.

Hurley said: “It’s a story about having a need for each other in a world that is quite lonely to survive in, and people who are isolated or alienated from each other.

"It’s about looking at the state of the world, and all that is difficult and challenging about it, and asking “whose responsibility is this?’ Is this the fault of the generation before, is it the fault of young people that won’t do anything? These are some of the questions that run through it, but it’s not going to be an essay, it's full of jokes. I’ve very deliberately tried not make it a campaign piece for anything.

Anders Hayward and Dani Heron in rehearsals for the Traverse Theatre Fringe show Adults.

“It’s about sex workers in the sense that two of the characters are sex workers, but it is really more about intimacy, alienation, loneliness, work, generations and disappointment at the state of the world than that it is about the legality of sex work.”

Hurley admitted he had a sense of satisfaction at being an Edinburgh-born writer staging an Edinburgh-set play at the Fringe, which has been criticised for the lack of opportunities available to showcase home-grown talent. He said: "When Gary McNair and I wrote the play Square Go for the Fringe, part of the feedback we got was that it was so rare and exciting to hear dialect like that on stage at the Fringe.

"It was lovely to get that validation. But it also p***ed me off and broke my heart a bit that it should be unusual.

“Part of the joy of the Fringe is that it’s international. Of course, you want stories from all over the world. But having more Scottish stories and voices on stage can only be a good thing.

“The Traverse has got three new plays by Scottish writers this year, which feels like a good statement of intent.”

Adults is Hurley’s first Traverse play since Mouthpiece, which explored two hugely different sides of Edinburgh after a working-class teenager stops a struggling middle-class writer from taking her own life.

Playwright Kieran Hurley will launch his new play Adults at the Traverse Theatre during this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Picture: Mihaela Bodlovic

Hurley said: “People remember and think of Mouthpiece as a very serious drama, and it is. But it is full of quite conventional gags and there’s character driven comedy in there. If Adults is skewed more towards comedy in how it’s marketed, that’s partly because the set-up is inherently quite comedic.

“There are serious issues at play, but, at the same time, there is enough in it that we want people to find funny, lively and engaging.

"I kind of try to do that with everything I do. It should feel like it’s a worthwhile contribution to something, but also be a good night out worth the ticket price.”