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First Fringe Firsts Announced Today in Edinburgh

The first five winners of this year's prestigious Fringe First Awards, celebrating high quality new drama at the Edinburgh Festival, are announced today (Friday 12 August 2005).

Scooping an award at the Traverse, Edinburgh's premier year-round new writing venue, is East Coast Chicken Supper (pictured), a comedy about two drug dealers with ordinary aspirations – such as chef Fred wanting to become the Jamie Oliver of Fife. US troupe The Riot Group are back on award-winning form with its latest, Switch Triptych, political poetry by Adriano Shaplin, set in a New York telephone exchange in 1919, which is at the Assembly@George Street.

Also winning this week are: Toby Gough’s play Children of the Sea, which interweaves real-life elements of the Boxing Day tsunami disaster in Sri Lanka with Shakespeare’s Pericles at the Royal Botanic Garden; The Devil’s Larder, about society’s strange relationship with food and dieting, at Traverse 4, Debenhams; and Give Up! Start Over!, centring on an unnamed character who seems to have eaten her TV set, at C, Chambers Street.

The Fringe First Awards, presented by The Scotsman newspaper in conjunction with the Fringe Society, are the festival's most prestigious recognition for drama. They were established in 1973 when there was concern that the Fringe was not attracting the right quantity and quality of shows. The awards are announced weekly during the festival. There is no fixed number given and the only requirement is that the work must be new - having had no more than six performances in the UK, prior to the Fringe.

The Edinburgh Fringe, the world's largest arts festival and now in its 59th year, opened on 7 August and continues to 29 August 2005 (See News, 5 Aug 2005). The Fringe’s parent event, the Edinburgh International Festival opens this Sunday, 14 August 2005.

- by Caroline Ansdell

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