Edinburgh International Festival theatre review: Cutting The Tightrope

Church Hill Theatre, until 10 August

Since the Edinburgh International Festival opened, a week ago, it has been criticised on various fronts: for issuing contracts that allegedly limit artists’ freedom of speech, for its sponsorship relationships with companies involved the arms trade and fossil fuel industry, and for lacking the courage of the Royal Opera House chorus member who famously unfurled a Palestinian flag on stage at Covent Garden three weeks ago.

In Cutting The Tightrope, though - a furious evening of 11 short plays by young writers, first seen at the Arcola in London last year, and now shaking the sedate walls of Edinburgh’s Church Hill Theatre - the 2025 Festival has found a show that addresses every one of those issues with a frankness and fervour, and a combination of rage and grief, that is often shocking, and always hugely energising.

As the show opens, an agonised director called Liam desperately tries to portray his theatre as apolitical, while his narrative is actually drowning in politics; the power of wealthy donors, and an incident in which an onstage watermelon - a recurring image through the play, symbol both of Palestine and of racial oppression - has almost brought Liam’s company to its knees.

Liam’s hopes of avoiding politics are blown sky high from the first moment of the first play, when - as surtitles bearing information about the war in Gaza, other global conflicts, and the response of British theatres and media, unscroll above the stage - an avowedly liberal British theatre director explains why she cannot stage the last testament of the little girl shot in Gaza, Hind Rajab, who appears to her as a ghost of a young woman begging to be heard.

The show continues, from excruciating family conversations with parents who would rather not think about the news, through the heartbreaking tale of a Gaza city florist who has lost his whole family in Israel attacks, a poignant online dating relationship between a young man in Britain and a young woman in Sudan, and compelling monologues about the troubled history of protest in Britain, and the rising tide of Islamophobia in Britain today.

There are cries of “free Palestine”, and the Palestinian flag appears, flourished around the stage by a young man bearing the watermelon; the Edinburgh audience applauds, a little cautiously.

In Cressida Brown and Kirsty Housley’s production, set on a stage with a dozen simple red plastic chairs, the politics is not subtle; it rages ands burns, and flirts with the flawed position that every enemy of arrogant western power must be a revolutionary, and a friend.

Yet with the authorship of each specific play carefully unspecified for security reasons, although the names of the playwright are listed, Cutting The Tightrope comes as a sharp and sometimes thrilling reminder of the risks and necessity of speaking out, in this age of surveillance, polarisation and cancellation; and should, over its short four-day run, become one of the unmissable events of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival.

Joyce McMillan

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