Edinburgh Transfers: Morecambe & Midsummer???

In addition to the ones already announced, be on the lookout for many more London transfers from last month’s Edinburgh Fringe over the coming months. Three more festival award winners – Morecambe, Midsummer and Internal – are almost dead certs.

Morecambe, which ran at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh and won a Fringe First, is Tim Whitnall’s tribute to the late comedian Eric Morecambe, performed by Bob Golding and directed by Guy Masterson. It will embark on a major regional tour this year ahead of a likely West End transfer.

Another Fringe First winner, Internal, is the latest offering from the Belgian teen theatre troupe Ontroerend Goed, which ran at Edinburgh’s Mercure Point Hotel care of the Traverse and producer Richard Jordan. Internal follows last year’s Once and for All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, which transferred to London’s Battersea Arts Centre, and is a sequel to 2007’s Smile Off Your Face, both also Fringe First winners. It’s aiming for a London production in 2010, though the trick will be finding the right venue for a piece in which the audience essentially speed-date the actors as part of an intimate confessional.

“Play with songs” Midsummer was a hit at the Traverse earlier this year and revived for the Fringe, when it won star Cora Bissett a Stage Award for Best Actress. The two-hander, written and directed by David Greig, follows a couple’s adventurous love story from an initial casual pick-up in a wine bar. It’s been mooted for either Soho or Hampstead theatres.

Although other high-profile shows that were tipped for transfers pre-festival – such as Denise van Outen’s Blondes, the comedian-cast revival of Restoration comedy The School for Scandal and serial killer musical Bloodbath – may yet make their way to London, poor reviews in Edinburgh won’t have helped their plans, at least in the short term.