Scotsman Fringe First awards: our final four winners of 2025 revealed
Our prizes for outstanding new writing premiered at the Fringe are announced each Friday during August - today we reveal our final week of winners.
As the Edinburgh Fringe reaches its closing weekend, we’re delighted to announce four final winners of our Scotsman Fringe First awards, adding to our list of week one and week two winners.
The Fringe Firsts were established in 1973 to encourage more people to premiere new theatre writing at the Edinburgh Fringe. Since then they have helped to launch countless stage and screen careers and are recognised across the world as the most important theatre award at the festival.
This year the awards are sponsored by Queen Margaret University Edinburgh and Stagecoach, and we are very grateful to them for supporting us to continue seeing hundreds of eligible shows premiering across the Fringe’s many venues. We are also very grateful to the Pleasance for hosting our three weekly award ceremonies, culminating in today’s final event at the Pleasance Grand. Today’s ceremony will feature special guest presenter Miriam Margolyes and a live performance by Fringe First winner Jade Franks. We’re also hosting four other prestigious prizes presented by the Brighton Fringe, the Adelaide Fringe, the Mental Health Foundation and the Gilded Balloon.
HOW THE FRINGE FIRSTS WORK
The Fringe Firsts recognise outstanding new writing premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe. Shows in the theatre, dance & physical theatre, and musicals & opera sections are eligible, and winners are announced on each Friday of the Fringe.
There is no set number of winners each week. Shows are privately nominated by The Scotsman’s team of critics, and winners are then decided on by a judging panel consisting of, this year, our chief theatre critic Joyce McMillan (as chair) plus writers Susan Mansfield, Mark Fisher, Jackie McGlone, Sally Stott, David Pollock, Fiona Shepherd and Fergus Morgan.
Our final four Fringe First winners of 2025 are:
Ohio
Assembly Roxy, various times, until 24 August
What we said: “US indie-folk duo The Bengsons - Shaun and Abigail - offer their audiences a meditative insight into the tensions that divide American society. In what they call “an ecstatic grief concert” - a one-hour cycle of songs punctuated by narrative - they chart their own personal journeys from childhoods shaped by religious faith through a long youthful process of doubt, rebellion, rejection, and rage, towards some kind of new accommodation with the aspects of life that are both spiritual and unknowable. None of this, though, ever seems to diminish the magnificent, raw strength of their music, of Shaun’s guitar and Abigail’s wild, magnificent singing, which ranges from the gentlest of dances and laments to heart-tearing rebel yells of rage and grief; in a show whose music comes from the very heart of American culture - religious, folk-based, touched by soul and blues - yet always succeeds in forging it into something brilliant, and new.”
#CHARLOTTESVILLE - The Play That Trump Does Not Want You To See!
Pleasance Courtyard, various times, until 24 August
What we said: “Priyanka Shetty’s impassioned solo show is a powerful docudrama about the events of 2017 in the city of Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, which Shetty witnessed as a young first year theatre student of Indian origin. Enraged by a city council decision to remove some statues and memorials commemorating Confederate leaders, the American far right, emboldened by Trump’s election the previous year, vowed to stage massive demonstrations in the normally quiet university city; and amid the torchlit white supremacist marches and huge counter-demonstrations that followed, one woman demonstrator was killed by a man who drove his car into the crowd. Shetty chronicles all this in vivid narrative style. The result is a riveting tale, told with intelligence and feeling, that cuts to the heart of the lingering racism and overt white supremacism that is helping to reshape American politics.”
Hot Mess
Pleasance Courtyard, various times, until 25 August
What we said: “It’s not often that you get an earth-shattering new take on a conventionally structured musical. This one, about our changing relationship with the planet we call home, pushes multi-rolling to its extreme with Danielle Steers playing the Earth and Tobias Turley as Humanity, as they get together and fall apart during the evolution of mankind. It’s an ingenious concept that’s constantly operating on at least three levels – classic make-up-break-up story, environmental commentary and witty comedy – in which Ellie Coote’s and Jack Godfrey’s writing and lyrics are defiantly cleverer than the mainstream, musical genre that they’re a part of but nevertheless tightly stick within.”
PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD
Summerhall, various times, until 25 August
What we said: “Kurt Cobain called The Shaggs - formed in 1965 by teenage sisters Dot, Betty and Helen Wiggin - his favourite band. Frank Zappa said they were better than The Beatles. This superb show from IN BED WITH MY BROTHER retells The Shaggs’ story with anarchic humour and intellectual rigour and finds resonant meaning in their odd journey. The show is messy, but every provocative decision is justified, stacking up into a coherent, caustic comment on the inescapability of the patriarchy, and how three sisters were exploited by men at every turn. There is method in this wonderful madness.”
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.