Kitson Scores Again in Round Two of Fringe Firsts

Eight winners are announced by The Scotsman newspaper today (15 August 2008) in the second round in this year’s prestigious Fringe First Awards, celebrating high quality new drama at the Edinburgh Festival.

The Traverse Theatre adds two more prizes to the three it garnered in the first round (See News, 8 Aug 2008). Perrier Prize-winning comedian-turned-theatrical storyteller Daniel Kitson (pictured) wins his third Fringe First – after those for C-90 (2006) and Stories for the Wobbly Hearted (2005) – for 66a Church Road, a break-up monologue about moving out of the flat he lived in for six years.

The second Traverse show to win an award this week is Irishman Mark O’Rowe’s new play about a man who sells his soul to the devil for a better singing voice, Terminus, presented care of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Last week’s Traverse Fringe First winners were The New Electric Ballroom, Deep Cut and Architecting.

Elsewhere, two Pleasance productions are winners today. The Caravan, performed to an audience of just eight in a caravan parked in the Pleasance Courtyard, is based on interviews with victims of the 2007 floods in England; and Omphile Molusi’s one-man play Itsoseng, at the Pleasance Dome, tackles inequalities and misfortunes in post-apartheid South Africa.

This week’s other Fringe Firsts go to: Paperweight, Top of the World’s almost silent comedy about office life at the Assembly @ George Street; Motherland, Live Theatre’s verbatim drama about the partners of military personnel in Iraq, at the Underbelly; Eight, a series of state-of-the-nation monologues performed by the Edinburgh University Theatre Company at Bedlam Theatre; and the Paper Birds’ In a Thousand Pieces, the tale of an Eastern European girl forced into the English sex trade, running at the Gilded Balloon Teviot.

The Fringe First Awards 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, with the final round of winners being announced next Friday 22 August 2008. 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.

– by Terri Paddock

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