Pip: Counter Culture, where the Fringe is apparently where history goes to settle its unfinished business — one trapdoor, one trench, and one medieval dance floor at a time.
Mara: Patrick Harrington’s been at the Edinburgh Fringe this season, and the posts cover a lot of ground — forgotten figures reclaimed from history’s margins, soldiers written out of the record, and a five-star comedy built on genuine medieval chaos.
Pip: Let’s start with the figures history couldn’t quite decide what to do with.
Forgotten Figures And Reputations
Mara: Two shows, two people history has handled badly — one erased, one misread. The question both productions are asking is whether theatre can correct that imbalance.
Pip: The Pierrepoint review sets the stakes early. The show, it says, “invites us to see the world through the executioner’s eyes” — not to excuse him, but to actually look.
Mara: And what that gets the audience is a figure who resists easy framing. Pierrepoint executed an estimated 435 people across roughly twenty-five years, including Ruth Ellis and John Reginald Christie, whose crimes anchor the production’s strongest material.
Pip: The review’s honest about where the show falls short — Christie gets the room, Pierrepoint’s own moral evolution gets squeezed into whatever’s left of a one-hour Fringe slot.
Mara: The Constance Lloyd show runs the opposite direction. Mrs Oscar Wilde gives its subject the full hour, and Lexi Wolfe’s performance, built through Constance’s own letters, means she “emerges from the margins of history to reclaim her place in a story that has long overlooked her.”
Pip: One show slightly underserves its subject, one finally serves hers. Both earn four stars or better — which suggests the Fringe is doing something right even when the scripts aren’t quite finished.
Mara: The soldiers history overlooked deserve the same treatment — and that’s where we’re headed next.
War Stories And Hidden Soldiers
Mara: The Last Bantam is about thirty thousand men under five-foot-three who volunteered for the Great War — and about how thoroughly they were written out afterward.
Pip: Michael Hughes, who wrote and performs the show, explains in an interview how his Dubliner protagonist Patrick Michael Wolfe signed up not for money but for Irish Home Rule — fighting in British uniform for a political future that was already slipping away.
Mara: The review puts it plainly: “History has been kind to the Dublin insurrections of 1916 and the Ulstermen of the 36th Ulster Division. Not so, the tens of thousands of Irishmen who served in the British Army in that conflict.”
Pip: So the upshot is that the Bantams were embarrassing to two different national stories simultaneously — too British for Irish memory, too Irish for British comfort.
Mara: Hughes describes in the interview how he shaped that tension through Wolfe’s letters home — a man who feels betrayed by the Easter Rising rebels, who wonders why they weren’t in the trenches with him. It’s the most contentious material in the show, and possibly why Dublin venues have been reluctant to host it.
Pip: From soldiers nobody wanted to claim, to a city that danced itself to death — which turns out to be its own kind of historical embarrassment.
Absurdity And Dark Humor
Pip: Strasbourg, 1518: citizens dancing compulsively in the streets until some of them die. The real event. The show leans in.
Mara: The review describes 1518: The Dancing Plague as inviting audiences to “shake your a** and dance ’til you (hopefully don’t!) die” — and means it as a promise, not a warning.
Pip: That’s the frame: a medieval mass hysteria retold as a late-night Fringe party where the joke and the dread arrive in the same beat.
Mara: Hannah Ponturo’s script wraps the chaos around a queer romance between two peasants, Katherine and Anna, whose relationship reignites as the city falls apart. The production draws explicit parallels to recent crises — Covid, institutional panic, the spectacle of authorities scrambling while ordinary people try to make sense of the mess.
Pip: The absurdity of people dancing themselves to death becomes, as the review puts it, “a mirror held up to the way we cope with uncertainty now: distraction as survival, movement as denial, rhythm as rebellion.”
Mara: What this gets the audience is something that arrives as chaos and lands as critique. The review calls it “messy, cheeky, knowingly ridiculous, and unexpectedly tender” — you come for the hysteria, you leave thinking about the systems underneath it.
Pip: Five stars for a show about dying of dancing. The Fringe remains a place where that sentence is completely normal.
Mara: And that’s the thread running through everything this week — theatre as the place where history’s unresolved arguments get another hour to breathe.
Pip: Executioners, forgotten wives, Bantam soldiers, dancing plagues — it’s a strange list until you notice they’re all asking the same question: who does history decide to remember, and why.
Mara: The shows that answer that best seem to be the ones that trust the audience to sit with the contradiction rather than resolve it neatly.
Pip: More of that, next time.
