Best of Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2010

A Celebration of UK performance in China

9 Theatre, Beijing

Founded in 1947, the Edinburgh International Festival grew out of the rubble of the Second World War with the aim of providing 'a platform for the flowering of the human spirit'. Now every August, the Festival presents three exhilarating weeks of the finest creators and performers from the worlds of the arts while Edinburgh's theatres, concert halls,  and smaller venues come alive with the best theatre, classical music, opera, dance and visual art from around the globe.

Since 2008, Milky Way Arts & Communications Co., Ltd began to present the Edinburgh Festival highlight so as to bring UK's finest new theatre productions to Chinese audiences. Vibrantly staged, emotionally engaging, experimental yet universally entertaining and accessible – these dramas explore the multi-dimensions of modern society and human sentiment.

If That’s All There Is

by Inspector Sands

A successful but desperately average couple are teetering on the brink of marriage. As the days count down towards the big one, panic rises. Unexpectedly, both find themselves becoming entangled with other people:  a jaded therapist who may or may not be suffering a mid-life crisis and an awkward teenager struggling to find an identity.

As their nice, normal lives begin to unravel, the question of what it would take to make them truly happy leads into increasingly strange and hilarious territory, where love and hate are dangerously, even life-threateningly, intertwined.

Home of the Wriggler

by Stan’s Cafe

Home of the Wriggler was provoked by the passion unleashed in Birmingham when BMW announced it was looking to dispose of MG Rover. It was to have been a documentary about a working factory but events caught up with us; Longbridge closed within a month of our first research visit. It would have been easy to make this show nostalgic or a requiem for the plant, but it’s not our history to be that intimate with, so we have tried to steer clear of sepia images. 

This show doesn’t attempt to tell the story of Rover. Instead it tells dozens of human stories, some very short, some entangled, others standing alone; all start after their beginning and finish before their end, missing out much in the middle. No one is expected to follow all the show’s strands, but we hope that in the collage of all these small stories elements of that big story will emerge. 

Although most of the material in Home of the Wriggler arises from stories we have been told, these sources have been mixed, mashed and re-imagined so that any resemblance to any characters living or dead should be considered un/happy chance. 

ONE SMALL STEP

by Oxford Playhouse

A note from the Writer, David Hastings:

One Small Step tells the story of the US/Soviet space race from Sputnik in 1957 to Apollo 11 in 1969. I was attracted to the subject for many reasons, most of them obvious: the scale, the spectacle, the drama. The Space Race is an archetypal story: humans leaving the familiar, venturing into the unknown to confront and, eventually, overcome seemingly insurmountable odds before returning to the fold with newly gained knowledge.

Why are there so many artistic portrayals of the Space Race? Because people are interested! People recognise it as the greatest scientific achievement in human history. But, perhaps, also, because subconsciously people also realise that the long-term survival of our species is dependent on us leaving Earth. The stubborn rufusal of the human race to curtail its breeding (in this writer’s lifetime alone we have doubled in number from 3 billion to 6 billion) and, as a result, climate change and the eventual exaustion of the Earth’s resources, have alerted us to the fact that to avoid self-destruction we will – albeit, centuries from now – inevitably leave our plant. And where do we go?