PLEASANCE THEATRE TRUST ANNOUNCE UNPARALLELED LEVEL OF SUPPORT FOR 2023 CHARLIE HARTILL WINNERS

Supporting an extraordinary six shows with £50,000 direct investment at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the 2023 Charlie Hartill winners have been announced by the Pleasance Theatre Trust. As Pleasance’s flagship fund offering unique and unparalleled support to theatre makers and comedians across the UK, these long-standing accolades provide a unique package of direct investment and mentoring support available across the Fringe. The fund seeks to remove financial risk for companies and allow creativity to take centre stage. Usually offering four opportunities for artists, one for emerging comedians, one for emerging theatre companies and two for UK-based Black, Asian and Global Majority-led theatre shows, this year the fund is supporting an unprecedented six shows due to the overwhelming quality of talent presented.

Past Charlie Hartill theatre winners have gone on to incredible successes. Current New Diorama Theatre Artistic Director David Byrne won the fund in 2009 with his theatre company PIT, and 2017 winners Unpolished Theatre toured to Australia, and won an Olivier with their show Flesh & Bone. Total Theatre Award Winners and fringe favourites In Bed With My Brother won in 2016 with acid house extravaganza We Are Ian and Corey Campbell, current CEO and Creative Director of the Belgrade in Coventry, won in 2018 with Freeman by his company Strictly Arts.

This year’s theatre winners celebrate diversity in subject matter, form and creative voices. Created by queer-led theatre collective Stroud & Notes and winning the 2023 Origins Award at VAULT Festival, new musical Public – The Musical follows four unlikely strangers who find themselves trapped together in a gender neutral public toilet, exploring stories of identity, connection and compassion alongside an electrifying pop/rock score. Pitch by November Theatre (The Stage’s Top Picks of the Fringe 2022) is a bold, joyful, goal-scoring exploration of the relationship between football and the queer community, blending documentary storytelling and theatre to investigate what it means to watch, play and love the beautiful game.

From The Thelmas, award-winning female-led theatre company renowned for their previous Fringe hit Ladykiller, Santi & Naz explores queer love, identity and loyalty against the backdrop of the partition of India. Created by Elisabeth Gunawan & Created a Monster, Unforgettable Girl is an award-winning, irreverent, no-holds-barred bouffonesque myth about the violence our culture inflicts on bodies of colour, with a £19.99 mail order bride at its centre. The performance previously won Gunawan the 2022 Stage Debut Award.

The Pleasance Comedy Reserve is back for its 17^thyear at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with a double bill of eight brilliant new acts, hand-picked by the Pleasance and performing at Pleasance Dome and Pleasance Courtyard. With the standard at an all-time high for up-and-coming comics, there will be two Comedy Reserve shows for 2023, with a line up featuring Abby Wambaugh, Ele McKenzie, Jin Hao Li, Kyrah Gray, Micah Hall, Shalaka Kurup, Vlad Ilich and Will Robbins. This is your chance to discover the most exciting comedy newcomers before they become household names, from the show that helped launch the careers of Brett Goldstein, Sophie Duker, Josh Jones, Roisin Conaty, Joe Lycett amongst others.

Established in 2004 in memory of Charlie Hartill, the fund provides opportunities to emerging comedians, emerging theatre companies and UK-based Black, Asian and Global Majority-led theatre shows. The fund is presenting, arguably, the biggest opportunities for artists across the Fringe supporting a wide breadth and range of work, proving that performance really is back with a bang.

Still to be announced are the National Partnerships shows, which sees the Pleasance work with venues nationwide to identify, recognise and fund extraordinary work from across the UK. With more comedy, theatre, circus, magic, dance, kids’ shows and much more to come, there’s nowhere quite like the Pleasance at Fringe!

{🎟 AD – PR invite – Tickets were gifted in exchange for an honest review}

A PISSEDMAS CAROL – REVIEW – LEICESTER SQUARE
by Amy Rye
The infamous Sh!t Faced Showtime are back in London with a festive edition, they have taken Dickens’ classic and put a drunken spin on it. The formula is the same as other iterations of the Shi!t Faced shows, one member of the cast has been boozing, and this time it is John Milton who plays Scrooge. Before the show, half a bottle of Jim Beam, some wine, and beer have been consumed in the previous 4 hours. The rest of the cast, try to keep the show on track, also aided by James Murfitt as the compere, Charles Dickens. The … More A PISSEDMAS CAROL – REVIEW – LEICESTER SQUARE
A CHRISTMAS CAROL – REVIEW – ALEXANDRA PALACE
by Ellie Preston
Spine-tingling yet heart-warming, Mark Gatiss’s retelling of A Christmas Carol truly encapsulates the haunting atmosphere of a Victorian ghost story, balanced out with enough humour so as to capture the festive season. Led by Keith Allen as Scrooge, with Peter Forbes as Marley, this show is perfect for Christmas viewing. The set design by Paul Wills is instantly captivating, containing stacks of metal cabinets towering over the theatre, moveable by the cast to allow space for other central props like doors, beds and tables. In addition to this, the puppetry design by Matthew Forbes is incredibly clever, adding creepy elements to the show such … More A CHRISTMAS CAROL – REVIEW – ALEXANDRA PALACE
A WOMAN WALKS INTO A BANK – REVIEW – THEATRE503
by Tom Carrao
The title of this winner of Theatre 503’s 2023 International Playwriting Award by Roxy Cook may seem like the set-up to a joke, but the narrative that unspools is instead an affectionate, gently barbed and at base quite sobering portrait of three ordinary souls (and one restless feline) adrift in modern Moscow. There is much affable, satirical back-and-forth commentary on the accepted myths & stereotypes of the Russian spirit & soul. Beset by the indignities of age, opportunism, graft, fatigue, the characters orbit one another, doomed to play out their roles in an unjust, predatory and saturnine universe. The play opens … More A WOMAN WALKS INTO A BANK – REVIEW – THEATRE503
PETER PAN GOES WRONG – REVIEW – LYRIC THEATRE
by Amy Rye
Peter Pan Goes Wrong first premiered in London at the Pleasance Theatre in 2013, and earlier this year the show made its Broadway debut. Now the production is back in the West End for the Christmas season. Following on from The Play That Goes Wrong, in this production, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is staged by the fictitious Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society and goes awry, disastrously so. The meta-comedy is filled with slapstick comedy, sometimes the humour may be predictable and silly, but it’s universally funny throughout – there is something for everyone here, and the laughs come thick and fast … More PETER PAN GOES WRONG – REVIEW – LYRIC THEATRE
GHOST STORIES BY CANDLELIGHT – REVIEW – SAM WANAMAKER PLAYHOUSE
by George Rennie
Drawing heavily from the classic canon of the British supernatural, HighTide’s trio of contemporary Gothic narratives uses traditional storytelling formats to address contemporary themes. Directed by Elayce Ismail, reverent musical interludes accompany tales of apparitions and nighttime conjurings that speak of women from the East of England. Unfortunately, the effect is less chilling and more lightweight, with conventional structures, predictable plot twists and an over-reliance on external forces to drive narrative shoring up some of the less relatable aspects of the genre. Nicola Werenowska’s The Beach House, perhaps the cleanest of the three tales, tells of a mother and daughter’s … More GHOST STORIES BY CANDLELIGHT – REVIEW – SAM WANAMAKER PLAYHOUSE