The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with nearly 3,500 shows. This year, Playbill is in Edinburgh for the entire month in August for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we're sharing which ones you absolutely must see if you're only at the Fringe for a short amount of time. Consider these Playbill Picks a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
Every year, the Edinburgh Fringe spreads throughout the city, turning any number of disparate buildings into theatrical venues for the month of August. Ranging from converted churches to the back rooms of pubs, it is actually quite rare to see a Fringe show in a purpose built theatre venue. Because of this phenomenon, it can be remarkably thrilling when a new location leaps onto the scene as a producer to watch.
Army @ The Fringe, which is housed in the Edinburgh Army Reserve Centre in New Town, is this year's thrilling new location. Opening up the Hepburn House to the public, Army @ The Fringe first began producing in 2017, with a focus on plays exploring the human realities of warfare and army life. This year, one of their productions, Everything Under The Sun, brings them ever closer to the big leagues.
Written and directed by Jack MacGregor, Everything Under The Sun explores the personal failure of the United Nations' "Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission" in Mali, which came to an end in June 2023 after more than a decade of failure.
For those of you unfamiliar with this state of affairs: Mali is a landlocked country in West Africa that has been repeatedly intruded upon and colonized by Europe to obtain the natural resources it provides (including copious amounts of gold, uranium, and lithium). Much of its northern landscape lies within the Sahara Desert, and under the sand, ancient prosperous cities have been buried. At one point, Mali was the richest empire in Africa, serving as a center for religious learning and cultural exploration.
In the late 19th century, France colonized Mali, rendering it a part of French Sudan, until Mali achieved independence in the latter half of the 20th century. In 2012, an armed conflict broke out, leading to a military coup, rebel factions, hostile takeovers, and more. In 2013, the UN sent nearly 13,000 peacekeeping troops in what was then considered a remarkable show of support for Mali. In 2023, the UN ordered all remaining troops to withdraw, and Mali continues to be troubled by mercenary groups as the country recovers from the impact of colonialism.
That is not what Everything Under The Sun is about. In many ways, Everything Under The Sun is about the fact that you likely didn't know more than one or two factoids about Mali.
The Mali conflict has been going on for more than a decade, but has rarely reached the front page of the Western press. Complicated and fraught with failures from the beginning, the press has almost unilaterally preferred to cover wars in other regions where divisive lines of "good" and "bad" can be more cleanly defined. Everything Under The Sun explores the life of one man, Ibrihim, who works as a translator for a UN peacekeeper from Scotland named Emma Kelly.
As Ibrihim, played by the marvellously talented Thierry Mabonga, puts it in the play's opening scene: "We are born in someone else's story, to play a part until we make our own." Ibrihim is thrust into the center of the conflict when he and Kelly (played with subtle strength by Rebecca Wilkie) are sent on a mission into Northern Mali, where it is soon revealed that any future attempts at peacekeeping are unravelling in the face of the West's shifting focus toward Eastern Europe and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As the never formally labelled war spins out in every direction, Ibrihim and Kelly find common ground, only for their tentative trust in each other to be ripped apart by a Russian Wagner mercenary (the vocal chameleon Bartosz Pol), a part of the contingent that invaded Mali in the 2020s. In real life, these mercenaries wreaked havoc and committed numerous massacres in their quest to claim Mali's riches for their own.
That this poetically written three hander is the second play of MacGregor's career is marvelous. At times bordering on immersive through the use of language alone, Everything Under The Sun is an extraordinary exploration of peace, and how tenuous and undefinable it truly is. Through its production, Army @ The Fringe has proven itself to be a venue/producer to watch.
Everything Under The Sun will be performed at Army @ The Fringe until August 27. For tickets, click here.
Thierry Mabonga in Everything Under The Sun
Thierry Mabonga in Everything Under The Sun
Thierry Mabonga and Rebecca Wilkie in Everything Under The Sun
Thierry Mabonga and Bartosz Pol in Everything Under The Sun
Rebecca Wilkie in Everything Under The Sun
