The Scotsman Fringe First awards: our first six winners of 2024 revealed

A History of Paper, Traverse Theatre | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

The Scotsman’s Fringe First awards 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.

Now the oldest prizes on the Fringe, the awards 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 and staging our three prize ceremonies throughout August, the first of which takes place today.

The Fringe Firsts are presented in recognition of outstanding new writing premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe. Shows in the theatre, dance & physical theatre, and musicals & opera sections are eligible, and winners are announced on each Friday of the Fringe.

There is no set number of winners each week. Shows are nominated by The Scotsman’s team of critics, and winners are decided on by a judging panel consisting of our chief theatre critic Joyce McMillan (as chair) plus writers Susan Mansfield, Mark Fisher, Jackie McGlone, Sally Stott, David Pollock and Fiona Shepherd.

Notable winners in previous years have included John Godber, David Harrower, Edwin Morgan, David Greig, AL Kennedy, Zinnie Harris, Steven Berkoff, John McGrath, Daniel Kitson, Stef Smith, Mark Thomas, Cora Bissett and Adura Onashile, in addition to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose one-woman show Fleabag was originally staged at Underbelly in 2013, and Richard Gadd, whose global Netflix hit Baby Reindeer was originally part of Summerhall’s programme in 2019.

Both of our new sponsors also have famous alumni who are also familiar Edinburgh festivals faces – former QMU students include comedian Craig Hill, playwrights Stef Smith and Morna Pearson, and actor Kevin McKidd, while Napier alumni include musician and composer Anna Meredith, and film director Lynne Ramsay.

Thank you to our judging panel for all their hard work in selecting this week’s first group of 2024 winners, and to Black Box for making our distinctive plaques. This week’s winners are:

BATSHIT (Traverse)

What we said: “In Australian theatre-maker Leah Shelton’s brief but brilliantly vivid solo show BATSHIT, she conjures up the life of her grandmother Gwen, who was written off as mad after finding herself unable to conform to the social norms imposed on housewives in 1960s Australia.

“It’s short, it’s often funny, and some of it is utterly shocking; and it tells a deeply political truth about the pathologising of female pain with unflinching courage and intelligence, in a show that’s both intensely theatrical, and, in the end, deeply moving.”

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The Border (Pleasance @ EICC)

What we said: “Studio Wachowicz-Fret’s beautiful tribute to Antonina Romanova, a non-binary artist who was living in Kyiv when Russia invaded Ukraine, conjures up the pressures both of the war, and of the long journey towards full rights for gay, trans an non-binary people; as well as insisting on the right of artists like Romanova to continue to be heard, even when war prevents them from fully practising their art.”

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Virginia Gay in Cyrano | Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Cyrano (Traverse)

What we said: “Virginia Gay’s gorgeous gender-flipped version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac offers a damn nearly perfect good night out at the theatre, a sizzling and hilarious 21st century comedy about human yearnings, aspirations and absurdities.”

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A History Of Paper (Traverse)

What we said: “A rare and sparkling event, given a huge additional weight by the death last year of the playwright, Oliver Emanuel, who co-wrote the piece with his long-time friend and collaborator, the composer Gareth Williams. Songs of deceptive simplicity and absolute beauty transform a classic narrative of love, bereavement and loss – a pervasive theme on this year’s Fringe – into something magical and strange by viewing it through the lens of the thousands of pieces of paper through which, even in our now supposedly “paperless” world, we record and document our lives.”

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Charlene Boyd, writer of June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music And Me. Photo by Jeremiah Reynolds

June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music And Me (Summerhall)

What we said: “It is the story of June Carter Cash’s early struggle to maintain and build an independent career in a patriarchal world, while raising two young daughters from two broken marriages, that Charlene Boyd intertwines with her own, in what is not only a stunning solo performance, but also her debut as a playwright.

“Backed by a brilliant three-piece on stage band, and put together by an outstanding creative team including director Cora Bissett, music director Pippa Murphy and designer Shona Reppe – June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music And Me emerges as a stunningly vivid and heartfelt tribute show-cum-memoir, all dressed up in 1950s hillbilly frills and sparkly stetsons, in telling a story that resonates with so many women’s lives.”

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So Young (Traverse)

What we said: “Set in writer Douglas Maxwell’s home territory of Glasgow’s south side, So Young chronicles the events of a single traumatic evening, when middle-class couple Liane and Davie go round to visit their recently widowed friend Milo, only to find that “poor Milo” wants to introduce them to his new partner Greta, a poised but glowing 20-year-old he has found on an internet hook-up site.

“The dialogue is fast, cheeky, frank, brilliantly observant, and often lethally funny. Director Gareth Nicholl’s brilliant cast of four – featuring a superb Andy Clark as Davie, with Nicholas Karimi and Yana Harris as the lovers – somehow unleash all the ferocity of humankind’s most ancient passions; from love, rage, desire and the timeless battle of the sexes, to ferocious envy of the young, and the fear of death that stalks us all.”

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