What's happened
Two plays at this year’s Edinburgh fringe blend intimate storytelling with mythic currents. Sally’s fall into a street hole catalyzes a modern tragedy in Zinnie Harris’s Supposing, while Malaika Kegode’s Badgers and Eva O’Connor’s For Dolores offer pointed reflections on memory, identity, and moral ambiguity. All push toward a hallucinatory future seen through everyday lives.
What's behind the headline?
Brief
- Harris’s Supposing is staged with minimalist design but rich mythic overlays, creating a dialogue between today’s liberal anxieties and ancient dramatic archetypes.
- Badgers stitches together several personal and social threads, delivering a sharp, if crowded, 75-minute experience.
- For Dolores focuses on intimate friendship dynamics and the consequences of modern choices, framed through a cross-cultural setting.
What this suggests for audiences
- The festival is presenting theatre as a site for examining collective guilt and memory, not just entertainment.
- Performances rely on strong individual turns (Cooper, Kegode, O’Connor, McDonnell, Faint) to carry complex ideas.
- The works invite debate about how mythic forms illuminate present-day conflict and identity.
How we got here
We are in Edinburgh’s festival season, where three new works—Supposing, Badgers, and For Dolores—are drawing attention for how they fuse contemporary life with mythic and social concerns. Harris’s piece follows Sally as she confronts visions and a chorus of voices; Badgers uses a younger generation’s podcasting impulse to interrogate truth and storytelling; For Dolores locates Irish life in a Scottish setting, exploring love, loss, and ambition.
Our analysis
The Scotsman review by Joyce McMillan; The Guardian festival critique; program notes from Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.
Go deeper
- What resonated most with you in Supposing's chorus of voices?
- Which moment from Badgers stays with you after leaving the theatre?
- How does For Dolores reshape expectations of Irish plays set abroad?
More on these topics
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Traverse theatre - Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland
The Traverse Theatre is a theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was founded in 1963 by John Calder, John Malcolm, Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco.
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Zinnie Harris - British playwright
Zinnie Harris FRSE is a British playwright, screenwriter and director currently living in Edinburgh. She has been commissioned and produced by the Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Shakespeare Comp