Scotsman Fringe First Awards: Our final five winners of 2024

My Mother's Funeral The Show at the Edinburgh Fringe | Rebecca Need-Menear

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Scotsman Fringe Awards, the end-of-festival awards ceremony that the newspaper began hosting in August 2004, initially at Assembly Hall, then in St Andrew Square, and now in a long-running partnership with the Pleasance. Today we presented our final five Fringe First awards of 2024 at the Pleasance Grand, and we were also delighted to continue our relationship with four long-standing festival awards. 

The Brighton Fringe Award and the Adelaide Fringe’s Holden Street Theatres Award both support their winners to take their shows far beyond Edinburgh, a demonstration of the enduring power of this festival to launch new work into the world. 

Our other two partner awards are dedicated to people who are no longer with us. The Filipa Braganca award was set up in memory of a gifted young theatre performer who died in 2016, while the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award, also founded in 2017, is now supported by the Cornwell Charitable Trust and dedicated to the late Tim Cornwell, an arts journalist who covered the Edinburgh festivals for The Scotsman for many years and was also part of the judging panel for the award. 

As always though, our ceremony began with the final week of our own Fringe First awards, which have been championing new stage work on the Edinburgh Fringe for over 50 years, helping to launch the careers of everyone from Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Billy Connolly to Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Richard Gadd.

The most long-established and prestigious theatre prizes at the Fringe are being jointly sponsored for the first time this year, by Edinburgh Napier University and Queen Margaret University (QMU). We are hugely grateful for this new support, which will help meet the cost of running the awards.

Here are this week’s final five Fringe First winners, and you can read about our week one and week two winners elsewhere on this website.

A Knock On The Roof (Traverse)

What we said: “In Khawla Ibraheem’s monologue she plays Mariam, a young Palestinian mother living in Gaza with her four-year-old son when the Israeli assault on Gaza begins, following the Hamas attack on south Israel in October 2023. Without explicit politics, her story offers a wild but absolutely credible mix of mounting panic, absurd comedy, and pure tragedy, as her life slides in weeks from relative normality to war-torn nightmare. And at the centre is Ibraheem’s stunning, funny and heartbreaking solo performance as Mariam; spinning its way towards a conclusion that stops the heart, but is sadly all too believable, in the hell of Gaza, 2024.”

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Instructions (Summerhall)

What we said: “Nathan Ellis’s script is a series of instructions. Each day, a new actor follows its directions accompanied by captions on a monitor that only they can see, and a film screen behind them, on which their image, instructions, and dialogue from unseen others is projected. In a web of commands, be they scripted in drama or computer code, this is a live exploration of the spaces where it still may (or may now not) be possible to give consent. If “all the world’s a stage,” then his distinctive, exhilarating and unique writing is the bridge between the theatre and what’s going on in the homes, offices and streets outside.” 

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Pic: (c) Alex Brenner

REVENGE: After the Levoyah (Summerhall)

What we said: “What a frenzied, hilarious treat for the imagination this play is. A pair of Jewish twins getting involved in a Tarantinoesque heist based around a plot to kidnap Jeremy Corbyn sounds like fodder for an ill-conceived student Fringe drama. Instead, Nick Cassenbaum’s play and Emma Jude Harris’s direction of it are absolutely masterful, a breakneck, frequently laugh-out-loud caper which turns upon the visceral performances of actors Dylan Corbett-Bader and Gemma Barnett.”

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My Mother’s Funeral: The Show (Roundabout @ Summerhall)

What we said: “This superb play by Kelly Jones, picked up by Paines Plough, is a clever, funny, incisive look at money, class and theatre - as well as death. Abigail (Nicole Sawyerr) has lost her mum and, as a young working-class theatre-maker, doesn’t have the £4,000 for the funeral. This play is a powerful reminder that death is not the great equaliser (unless you can get your hands easily on £4,000). And it is a critique of a theatre sector hungry for “authentic” working-class voices which then risks appropriating these stories and moulding them to fit its own narrow expectations. We laugh, but uneasily. The audience is not off the hook either.”

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A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here (Zoo Southside)

What we said: “After Josie Dale-Jones’s sex education show for children was ‘cancelled’ following an online backlash over the idea, the experience left her wondering if she ever wanted to stage anything or speak publicly again. A Little Inquest is a powerfully honest piece in which Dale-Jones lists what she now believes did and didn’t work about the abandoned creation but also addresses her own hypocrisy when it comes to allowing others to express ideas that she doesn’t agree with. It’s a celebration of expressing what you believe in despite the fear of how others might respond – a readdressing the balance between the individual and the mob.”

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We would like to say a huge thank you to the brilliant team at the Pleasance for hosting the Scotsman Fringe Awards once again, to our Fringe First judging panel, Joyce McMillan, Susan Mansfield, Mark Fisher, Jackie McGlone, Sally Stott, David Pollock and Fiona Shepherd, and to the rest of the Scotsman’s  Edinburgh festivals team, all of whom work incredibly hard to put together our comprehensive daily festivals coverage, in print and online. We would also like to thank Black Box in Edinburgh for creating our distinctive Fringe First plaques.