Fringe First award winners announced

Jenna Watt is one of this year's Fringe First winners

Today we are delighted to announce seven more winners of our Fringe First awards.

The Scotsman Fringe Firsts are the longest-running and most prestigious theatre prizes at the festival, awarded each week during August to outstanding new writing premiered at the Fringe. Many congratulations to all our winners, and thank you again to our panel of dedicated judges.

Fabric
Abi Zakarian’s dazzling new play, showing at Underbelly, is the story of a woman whose dreams of a good relationship with a decent man gradually fall apart, destroyed by the mass produced sexual violence of porn.

Two Man Show 
RashDash’s new show at Summerhall – in which two 
women play two men – is perhaps their most profound meditation yet on how ideas about gender limit our sense of self.

Daffodils (A Play With Songs) 
Set in New Zealand between the 1960s and the 1990s, Bullet Heart Club’s show at the Traverse begins with a cheerful explosion of rock ‘n’ roll before the music takes a darker turn, mirroring its love story’s journey from youthful optimism to emotional silence and hidden betrayal. 
It packs a serious emotional punch, wrapped in a bubblegum glove.

Tank 
Breach Theatre’s new show, at the Pleasance Dome, tells the true(ish) story of the worst experiment in the world – the time Nasa funded Stanford University to try and talk to dolphins. It’s a raw, joyous show about imperialism and humanity’s capacity to mistreat nature.

Us /Them

Staged at Summerhall by Brussels-based youth theatre group BRONKS, 
Us/Them is a 
dazzlingly confident and utterly absorbing retelling of the Beslan school siege of 2004, told from the perspective of the children – the story of a day when everyone went to school and nearly 400 of them didn’t come back.

Mark Thomas: The Red Shed 
Narrative is power – but what if the stories we tell ourselves aren’t true? That’s the idea at the heart of Mark Thomas’s latest show for the Traverse, a tribute to the working people’s club he first visited as a comedian in his twenties. A beautifully structured story about a quest to understand a valued part of his past, it has left many audience members wiping away tears.

Faslane 
Jenna Watt’s thoughtful, finely-shaped monologue, at Summerhall, explores her complex relationship with Faslane, a place that houses 
nuclear weapons that could kill millions, but has also employed members of her family for decades. It is a gentle but gripping show.