Thank you to everyone who came to see our production of A Sudden Burst of Blinding Light by Ben Maier at ZOO Southside this August, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015. We are very pleased with how the show was received and very proud of our hardworking cast and crew who put on 23 performances over 24 days!
The show has now been seen by over 700 people, including journalists from The Stage, Broadway Baby and The Edinburgh Guide. Here’s what they had to say:
* ‘Our gameshow hosts […] inject a disturbingly frenzied energy which is impressively maintained for the duration’ – Broadway Baby
* ‘Frankie Valium […] croons with a wonderfully indulgent voice’ – Broadway Baby
* ‘The transformative power of love is what Ben Maier’s smart, elusive new play is really getting at’ – The Stage
* ‘Gutsy visuals and strong performances’ – The Stage
* ‘The production is a colourful, surreal and inventive look at how we regard and treat mental illness’ – The Edinburgh Guide
We also received a lot of delightful feedback from members of the audience. Here are just a few of our favourite tweets:
@LordPasola: #BlindingLight was brilliant in both senses of the word. Congrats @GreyGreenTheatr on an artful performance of a necessary piece of writing.
@jessbrien: @GreyGreenTheatr #BlindingLight bold, unnerving & genuinely entertaining. Brilliant performances all round @ZOOvenues
@feralfoxyladies: @GreyGreenTheatr #BlindingLight beautiful writing, fabulous acting & stunning imagery. Get yourselves down to last few shows!! #edfringe
@CharDunnico: @GreyGreenTheatr #BlindingLight is a great show! Pure magic
The ever-enchanting Frankie Valium was also featured on the Three Weeks fringe podcast. Click here to listen (about 5 minutes from the end)!
We also saw a wide variety of exciting and powerful theatre, dance, comedy and performance art at the festival. We’d love to share some of our highlights with you:
– Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan and Fake It ‘Til You Make It by Bryonny Kimmings and Tim Grayburn – both of which are superb representations of the realities of mental illness, which touched us deeply.
– We also loved Northern Stage’s Five Feet In Front for it’s high energy performances and music, Fine Mess Theatre’s Islands for it’s sharply satirical depiction of two contemporary yuppies and I Am Beast for it’s dramatic puppetry and atmospheric fantasy world.
– Our pick of many brilliant one-woman shows are the brilliantly bonkers Happy Birthday Without You by PaperMash Theatre, the fascinating and relatable Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot by Rebecca Crookshank and the delicately warm and witty Pheasant Plucker by Lily Bevan.
– Lastly, we were delighted to be hosted by ZOO Venues, which has one of the most daringly curated programmes at the festival. We saw many wonderful pieces at our venue, but must pick out Feast by Clout Theatre – a powerful expression of consumption and waste, the beautifully surreal Da-Da-Darling by Impermanence Dance Company and To Kill A Machine by Scriptography Productions, which told the powerful story of Alan Turing through stellar performances.
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We couldn’t have done this without a lot of support, so thank you once again to everyone who helped us get there! With a successful Edinburgh run under our belts we are now taking some time to reflect and to plan for the future. Watch this space for more details.