Posts Tagged Summerhall

PUTTANA – Q&A with Mirko Corradini

September 19, 2026 at 5:14 pm · Filed under Interviews, Theatre ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PUTTANA was one of the most talked‑about international productions at this year’s Fringe: intimate, unsettling, and formally daring. It confronts prejudice, judgement, sex work, and the quiet violence of how society enters other people’s lives. Ahead of its wider international run, Counter Culture presents this in‑depth conversation with director Mirko Corradini, exploring the dramaturgy, ethics, sound design and collaborative process behind the production.

What first compelled you to create PUTTANA, a piece that confronts sex work, judgement, violence, and shared responsibility?

“PUTTANA began above all with a question about prejudice.”

He describes reading an article about a porn performer refused housing because of her job, and the question that stayed with him: why do we feel entitled to judge someone whose choices do not harm us? “I was not interested in saying that prostitution is right or wrong. I wanted to stop one step earlier.”

The show uses fragmentation rather than linear storytelling. What dramaturgical purpose does that structure serve?

“Our thoughts are never completely linear… In PUTTANA, different people speak… sometimes they seem to be in dialogue but are not really listening.”

Corradini explains that the structure mirrors the spectator’s slowly forming judgement rather than a traditional plot.

How did you approach directing a one‑woman performance that requires the actor to embody multiple characters around Laura?

“The main rule was to create together.” He recounts a rehearsal mistake that became a breakthrough, revealing how characters emerged collaboratively through experimentation

Why binaural audio and headphones?

“I realised that the real strength of the piece was that proximity… The headphones were the answer.”

The immersive sound design recreates intimacy even in larger spaces.

How do sound, proximity and moral tension interact?

“Sound does not accompany the performance. It is part of the direction.” Much of the audio is “dirty, unsettling sound” that becomes music.

Why was Beatrice Elena Festi chosen as your collaborator?

“I felt an artistic connection… elegance and precision in the transitions.”

Her subtle physical shifts made her ideal for a piece where technology completes the transformation.

How much emerged from her interpretation?

“A generous actor can create a new possibility simply through a mistake, a breath, a posture.”

How can theatre explore judgement and violence ethically?

“I can bring someone into a very intense situation as long as I continue to respect them.” He avoids literal nudity or violence to keep focus on meaning, not shock.

How did you see your responsibilities when dealing with emotional risk?

“Artistic availability must never become coercion.”

What did you hope Fringe audiences would confront?

“I wanted the spectator to ask themselves: Do I judge? Do I have prejudices?”

What surprised you in Edinburgh?

“Can this show speak to… someone from a culture completely different from ours? Edinburgh gave me an answer. Yes.”

What was the impact of the SoHo Playhouse Encore Series selection

“The New York selection gave me the confidence that PUTTANA could find an international audience precisely without giving up its willingness to take risks.”

How does PUTTANA relate to your wider work?

“I am interested in investigating what we do not say… the shadows we carry inside ourselves.”

What did this production teach you?

“That I enjoy myself more when I experiment.”

Where next?

“I can fall in love with a piece for a single actress… but also with a much larger project.”

What should spectators carry with them?

“Do I judge? Do I have prejudices? Will I look at someone differently tomorrow?”

Read our review of Puttana here
Read our interview with Beatrice Elena Festi here

 

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Interview with Beatrice Elena Festi

September 14, 2026 at 3:52 pm · Filed under Drama, Interviews, Theatre ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Puttana traps you in its intimacy from the first moment. Festi describes how the headphones collapse the space until she’s performing inside the audience’s heads as much as her own, navigating that strange mix of control and vulnerability. Her shifts between identities carry the same charge — especially the moment she steps into the middle‑aged man, a voice that still hits her with anger, pleasure, and a kind of unsettling satisfaction. The rapid transitions work because she’s interpreted her role line by line, each character anchored in its own emotional image and mental room.

What gives the piece its force is her refusal to soften anything. She leans into the ethical weight, the complicity, the silences that pin everyone in place. The collaboration with Corradini let her work without armour, drawing on her twenty‑year‑old self to shape Laura as someone who never collapses into victimhood. Summerhall sharpened the political edge, New York confirmed the universality, and performing it night after night turned the role into a meditation. Across the interview, one thread keeps surfacing: vulnerability as a deliberate act of power, and a commitment to reaching something stripped‑back and honest on stage. Here’s our interview with Beatrice Elena Festi.

Performance, embodiment, technique

Puttana places you inside a binaural, three‑dimensional soundscape. How did performing inside headphones change your physical and emotional approach to Laura?

“Performing while wearing wireless headphones definitely changed the way I inhabit the stage… The distance between me and the audience — who are also wearing headphones — shrinks, making the experience intimate and personal… By wearing headphones myself, I also become a spectator of my own voice: this gives me control, but it also makes me vulnerable… Thanks to the headphones, a kind of short circuit occurs: Laura becomes a tangible presence in my ears and in my head.”

You embody several characters around Laura — student, sex worker, husband, wife, young man. Which identity demanded the biggest shift in your internal state?

“The first time I heard my own voice as a man it was a shock… Being able to play a middle-aged man by ‘wearing’ his voice is an incredibly powerful experience… Playing him brings on a mix of anger and pleasure… he always gives me a sense of satisfaction while I play him.”

The show’s fragmented structure requires rapid transitions. How do you keep emotional coherence while moving between characters so quickly?

“I associate a specific image and a specific feeling with every line of the text… It’s a long process — it took three years — in which I worked to build automatic reactions… Each character has their own mental space that I can enter and leave quickly, helped along by their different voices.”

Themes & ethics

The piece confronts judgement, violence, and the commodification of women’s bodies. How do you navigate the ethical weight of representing these realities on stage?

“I believe that engaging with uncomfortable subjects is at the heart of what I do… questioning yourself, examining social and political issues, is an essential part of any real artistic exchange… If art isn’t uncomfortable… then what’s the point? What’s the point of being reassured?”

Puttana deliberately places the audience in a position of complicity. What does it feel like to perform a work that refuses moral reassurance?

“In our show the audience becomes complicit… We’re all implicated, always… From the moment I step on stage I make eye contact with every member of the audience… The audience has no way out… it’s vital to put ourselves on the line, to sit with the discomfort and confront our own dark sides.”

There are moments where silence becomes confrontational. What is the most difficult silence in the show for you to hold?

“The hardest moment is definitely the direct exchange with the audience… Physical closeness, the gaze and the silences let me dig into people’s souls… I feel vulnerable and powerful at the same time… There’s no escape route for anyone; we’re in it together.”

Process & collaboration

You’ve worked with director Mirko Corradini on multiple TeatroE projects. What aspects of his direction made this collaboration particularly effective for such an intimate piece?

“Four years ago… I understood straight away how much Mirko Corradini cared about the project… There has never been any arrogance or superficiality… Mirko is a director who creates a performance bit by bit… and he’s very careful to create a safe space where I can feel at ease.”

How did the rehearsal process shape the emotional core of Laura’s story? Were there moments where the material felt too close or too exposing?

“To find Laura, I drew on my twenty-year-old self… I put my own personal vulnerability at Laura’s service: in a show like this you can’t hide… humanity has to seep out of every gesture, every word.”

What discoveries did you make about Laura during rehearsal that changed how you performed her?

“Laura is never a victim… Even when she momentarily loses control, she finds a way to regain it… The ending, however brutal, shows this resolution… Acting in another language was also illuminating… In English, Laura is more brazen and more self-assured.”

Fringe experience

Summerhall is known for politically charged work. How did performing Puttana in that environment influence your relationship to the piece?

“Performing at Summerhall was an honour… they always engage with topical, hot-button and uncomfortable subjects… On stage I felt at ease, because I knew I was in an environment that would protect me.”

What surprised you most about how Edinburgh Fringe audiences responded to the show?

“The Summerhall audience was a mixed one… far more men came to see us… They proved more receptive to the rawness of the performance… The audience’s reactions were positive and open to engagement.”

Did performing the show daily at the Fringe change your understanding of Laura or the characters orbiting her?

“Going on stage every night… becomes a kind of meditation… Every night Laura is different… I always tried to be as honest as possible… Laura is a very human character… she doesn’t conform to a prejudice.”

International recognition

Puttana’s Off‑Broadway run at SoHo Playhouse happened before Edinburgh. How did that New York experience shape your sense of the work’s impact?

“Performing in New York before Edinburgh was an excellent training ground… The American audience… very engaged and warm… It was the New York audience that convinced us Laura’s story was universal.”

Artistic development

How does Puttana connect to your broader artistic interests in vulnerability, power, and spectatorship?

“Puttana has allowed me to grow enormously… It’s a show that has taught me… about limits, about letting go on stage, about reaching a naked truth… I’ve always been drawn to realism and social themes… multifaceted, even ambiguous characters — ones that dig deep — appeal to me.”

Future direction

After a role this demanding, what kind of work do you feel drawn toward next? What are your plans?

“With TeatroE… we’re working on various ideas for a new production… Another show that, through technology, will let us close the distance with the audience… I’d like my work to always speak to people’s humanity… I do believe art can change the world, and in my own small way I try to do my part.”

Our review of Puttana is here

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Puttana at Summerhall: Beatrice Elena Festi’s Raw, Immersive One‑Woman Reckoning

August 12, 2026 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Drama, Edinburgh Fringe 2026, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026, Theatre ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

★★★★★ Puttana is an intimate, one‑woman interrogation of a life lived at the intersection of desire, commerce and shame. The performance follows a single protagonist — a woman whose public persona and private interiority are braided together — as she moves through a series of encounters, memories and imagined conversattions. The show is structured as a sequence of short, sharp scenes and interior monologues rather than a conventional linear narrative: one moment you’re with her in a room negotiating a transaction, the next you’re inside her head as competing voices argue about agency, guilt and survival.

Technically the piece is built around an immersive headphone score that fractures the action into overlapping layers: external interlocutors, inner voices, and a kind of running commentary that sometimes addresses the audience directly. Beatrice Elena Festi slips between roles — client, confidante, accuser, child of memory — so the plot feels less like a story being told and more like a life being unpeeled. Key beats include confrontations about power and money, flashbacks that reveal how the protagonist learned to commodify herself, and moments of stark vulnerability where nudity and silence are used as ethical provocation rather than spectacle.

Puttana, as performed by Beatrice Elena Festi, doesn’t just ask you to watch — it asks you to account for yourself. The headphones and layered soundscape collapse the distance between performer and spectator, turning what might have been a passive evening into an interrogation of attention: whose voice are you listening to, whose body are you complicit in consuming, and where does empathy end and spectacle begin. Psychologically, that collapse is brilliant; it forces a kind of cognitive dissonance where your instinct to look away meets the theatrical demand to stay present, and that tension is where the piece does its work.

Philosophically, the show stages a conversation about agency and commodification. By foregrounding nudity and explicit power dynamics, Festi reframes vulnerability as a site of political argument rather than mere exposure. The nudity is not gratuitous — it’s a deliberate ethical provocation that asks the audience to examine the systems that turn bodies into transactions, and to recognise how easily spectatorship can become endorsement. In that sense the piece is less about shocking for shock’s sake and more about making visible the moral choices we perform in the dark.

On a human level, the experience is intimate and uncomfortable in equal measure, and that’s the point. You leave slightly unsettled because the show has done what good art should: it has altered the angle from which you see yourself and others. It doesn’t hand you answers; it hands you a mirror, a set of headphones, and the responsibility to decide what to do with the reflection.

Reviewed by Pat Harrington

Read our interview with Beatrice Elena Festi here

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Summerhall 2026: Seven First Signals From a Venue That Refuses to Stand Still

March 13, 2026 at 8:41 am · Filed under Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026 ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s a particular electricity to a Summerhall announcement — that sense of a building already humming with ghosts of festivals past, now cracking its knuckles for the next round. With the first seven shows of its 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme now on sale, the venue once again stakes its claim as the city’s home of the unruly, the searching, the politically alive. What emerges from this first wave is a portrait of a programme thinking internationally, listening carefully, and refusing to let the world’s fractures pass without artistic interrogation.

Below, the early contours of a festival season that already feels like it has something urgent to say.

Two dancers performing a duet on stage, gracefully interacting under colorful lighting.

Tether 인연 — Wonder Fools & Theatre SAN

Scotland ↔ South Korea | Theatre, music, memory

Wonder Fools have long been one of Scotland’s most emotionally literate companies, and their collaboration with South Korea’s Theatre SAN feels like a natural evolution of their practice: expansive, musical, and attentive to the quiet ways history lodges itself in the body.
Tether 인연 spans sixty years and three generations, stitching together folk songs, love letters and war stories into a cross‑continental meditation on the threads that bind people — and nations — long after the headlines fade. It promises the warmth of a ceilidh, the intimacy of a whispered confession, and the political charge of two cultures meeting on equal footing.

As Far As We Know

England | Prophetic storytelling, contemporary dread

YESYESNONO return to Summerhall with As Far As We Know, a new piece that feels eerily attuned to the moment we’re living through. Writer‑performer Sam Ward has always been a cartographer of contemporary unease, and here he guides audiences through a world that keeps glitching: holes opening in the ground, prices rising without logic, bubbles swelling and bursting in endless cycles. It’s a hallucinogenic road‑trip through a landscape where the maps no longer match the territory.

A sign for '99 Cents Only Stores' under a clear blue sky, surrounded by palm trees.

Ward’s storytelling is intimate and conspiratorial, the kind that makes you feel as though you’re being entrusted with something fragile. He threads together cartographers, psychics, crashes and anomalies into a portrait of a society struggling to make sense of itself. The humour is dry, the melancholy is earned, and the political charge hums just beneath the surface without ever tipping into didacticism.

What emerges is a quietly radical act of orientation: a show about trying to understand what’s going wrong in a world that refuses to be understood. YESYESNONO once again offer theatre as a shared act of reckoning — a reminder that even when the ground is shifting, we can still choose to look at it together.

Three dancers in minimal attire striking dynamic poses on a stage with a gray backdrop.

GOOD ENOUGH? — HIMHERANDIT

Denmark | Queer physical theatre, joyful resistance

HIMHERANDIT return with a piece that feels like a rallying cry wrapped in glitter and sweat. GOOD ENOUGH? celebrates imperfection, queer joy and the courage required to take up space in a world that still polices bodies and narratives.
Their work is always kinetic, always emotionally forthright, and here they lean into the boisterous, the awkward, the unapologetic. It’s a show about reclaiming your story — not quietly, but loudly, with a grin.

Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life — Keith Alessi

A man playing a banjo while wearing a cap, focused on his instrument in a dimly lit setting.

USA | Storytelling, music, resilience

Some shows become Fringe folklore, and Keith Alessi’s is one of them. Returning for a fourth consecutive year after three sell‑out runs, this warm, banjo‑laced memoir of illness, survival and artistic salvation has become a kind of communal ritual.
Alessi’s generosity is not metaphorical: through donations and artist fees, he has raised over $1.2m for charities worldwide, and this year’s proceeds support Summerhall Arts itself. It’s rare to see a show that radiates this much heart without slipping into sentimentality; rarer still to see one that changes lives offstage as well as on.

SAND — Kook Ensemble

A man in a light-colored shirt appears to be releasing a cloud of sand from his hand, with a focused expression, against a dark background.

England | Circus theatre, dementia, coastal memory

Kook Ensemble’s SAND is a non‑verbal circus theatre piece set against the dramatic Devon coastline, exploring the lives of people living with dementia.
There’s something quietly radical about using acrobatics — a form associated with strength, balance and control — to illuminate a condition defined by fragility and disorientation. The company’s meticulous storytelling promises a work that is both tender and unflinching, a reminder that memory is not just a cognitive function but a landscape we inhabit together.

PUTTANA — Beatrice Festi

A composite image featuring a woman in three poses. On the left, she wears a wolf mask and headphones, in the center she appears contemplative, and on the right, she holds a microphone while wearing a lace bodysuit.

Italy | Immersive solo performance, body politics

Fringe debutant Beatrice Festi arrives with a piece that refuses to look away from the ways society commodifies the body. PUTTANA is bold, uncomfortable, and deliberately confrontational — a solo performance in which one actress voices five characters through a fusion of music and text.
It’s a work that asks what we’ve normalised, what we’ve excused, and what we’ve allowed to be taken from us. Expect a show that leaves the air charged.

LANDSFRAU — Mariann Yar

Afghanistan / Diaspora | Feminist storytelling, counter‑archive

Mariann Yar’s LANDSFRAU moves between 9/11 and 2021, dismantling the Western gaze on Afghanistan and building a counter‑archive from song, dance and memory.
This is diasporic storytelling at its most intimate: a reckoning with inherited guilt, privilege, distance and longing. Yar’s work promises a feminist perspective that refuses simplification, offering instead a textured portrait of a life shaped by war yet not defined by it.

A Programme Already Speaking in Many Tongues

This first announcement — with more expected — signals a Summerhall season rooted in internationalism, political clarity and artistic risk. These are works concerned with memory, identity, and the stories we inherit or resist. They ask who gets to speak, who gets to be seen, and how we might hold each other through the fractures.

If this is only the beginning, August at Summerhall looks set to be a month of boldness, beauty and necessary discomfort — exactly what the Fringe should be.

More information on the shows here

By Pat Harrington

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Cover design for 'Lyrics to Live By 2' featuring a vinyl record and text highlighting the book's themes of reflections, meditations, and life lessons, on a bright yellow background.

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Culture Vulture: Our Guide to the week’s entertainment

November 6, 2021 at 11:47 am · Filed under Culture Vulture ·Tagged , , , , ,

5-21 November 2021

Edinburgh Short Film Festival, Summerhall Cinema

Short films are a great art form in their own right. This is the chance to see a range. https://www.edinburghshortfilmfestival.com/

Saturday, November 6, 2021

There’s quite a bit of ABBA on Channel 5. It starts with ABBA: Then and Now In Their Own Words at 9:10. This is a celebration of the band with interviews archive footage and music telling the story of the Swedish superstars. Contributors include singers Neil Sedaka and Barbara Dickson. After that, there is ABBA live in concert and ABBA the movie. All this coincides with the release of a new album (Abba Voyage – their first studio album in 40 years) and planned virtual shows which are sure to delight fans. Benny and Bjorn even offered to write a Eurovision Song contest entry for Britain – but only if someone like Dua Lippa can be signed up to sing it!

Monday, 8 November 2021

Dexter: New Blood, Sky Atlantic 10:05 pm

Many years following his supposed death we that anti-hero Dexter Morgan is living a quiet life. Dexter was last seen disposing of his dead sister and faking his own death once his crimes became known. Dexter was lumberjacking in Oregon and now works in the garden and bait in a small town in upstate New York. He’s even dating the local police chief. But how far can he keep his ‘Dark Passenger’ in check?

Tuesday, 9 November 2021

Chi-Owi Nwanoku on Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Sky Arts, 10:15 pm

I know only a few facts about Coleridge-Taylor. That he was a composer/conductor. That his mother was English and his father was from Sierra Leone. That he was born in Lond and that he wrote three cantatas on the epic poem Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This programme will be an opportunity for me to discover more.

From 11-14 November 2012

The Radical Book Fair at the Assembly Roxy

This four-day event is themed around ‘Futures Worth Fighting For’. Magpies are said to steal shiny things. I will be channeling the Magpie and looking for interesting ideas and books amongst the ‘self-indulgent, liberal, Woke nonsense’. Who knows, if I keep an open mind some of that might even be interesting or entertaining!

https://www.facebook.com/RadicalBookFair/

From 12 November 2021 on Amazon Prime Video

Lioness: the Nicola Adams story is available from Friday the 12th of November on Amazon Prime Video. Nicola won fame when she became the first woman ever to be crowned Olympic flyweight boxing champion at the London games in 2012. She won Gold again. During her professional career, she also claimed the WBO championship. Nicola who came from adverse beginnings and had many obstacles to overcome is an inspiring figure. She’s smart too. When she was asked what people should take from her story she said: “I’m hoping they’ll be inspired and have the courage to pursue their dreams and do whatever they want in life and I hope they realise that you’re only on the planet for a short space of time.” Truly a British Lioness!

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