Theatre forms nearly a third of the entertainment at the 2014 Buxton Festival Fringe.
One of the highlights is expected to be Fringe Award winners Butterfly’s presentation of Dracula’s Women Underground in Poole’s Cavern.
Scrivener’s Bookshop with its Victorian cellar will become the spooky setting for Cul-de-sac theatre company’s The Ghosthunters’ Club and also for Threadbare Carpet’s The Good Lady Ducayne which is inspired by a Victorian horror story.
Equally unnerving should be Wireless Theatre’s chiller The Woman on the Bridge, performed in the opulent setting of the Palace Hotel.
Away from the more well-used theatre spots in Buxton, new managed venue The Market Place plays host to Orange and Pip Theatre’s After Alice, written by Fringe new writing nominee Lilly Posnett and focusing on three best friends processing their grief or lack of it after a friend’s death.
The Hydro Restaurant and Bar will be the setting for a minimalist production of The Railway Children by Crowd of Two Theatre Company and the Old Hall Hotel provides the backdrop for Act-IV Theatre Company’s Oui Chef! about the Victorian chef Alexis Soyer.
Other productions will take audiences back in time. The Off-Off-Off Broadway Company reworks Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as Back Door and sets it in 1920s Paris, Hasland Theatre Company tells the true story of The Elephant Man and Breathe Out Theatre’s An Extraordinary Light acknowledges the role played by scientist Rosalind Franklin in discovering the structure of DNA.
Arletty Theatre will take to Buxton Swan Canaries, a musical play about the women who filled military shells during World War I.
Dreamshed Theatre explores the relationship of comedians Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams in Seriously Funny while Tony Earnshaw’s The Speech has a female PM struggling to preside over a series of disasters with the help of her speech writer.
A Yorkshire cricket umpire has a massive lottery win in Godfrey’s Last Stand by Talking Stock Productions while the life choices of three characters are examined in First Class by Aulos Productions and Relief Theatre.
Phillipa and Will Are Now in a Relationship, part of a double bill from Freerange, creates a kind of Romeo and Juliet for the Facebook age, and Boy on a Bed from Organised Chaos Productions explores the ramifications of a runner’s decision to pose for a painter with very different values.
Works by classic authors includes Uproot Theatre Company’s two-man version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Sudden Impulse Theatre Company’s presentation of Stephen Berkoff’s adaptation of Kafka’s In The Penal Colony and Sudden Impulse Theatre’s offering of Dario Fo’s class-based farce One Was Nude and One Wore Tails.
Fringe chair Keith Savage says, “It’s fantastic to see so much theatre on the Fringe and the sheer range of it is second to none.”
Buxton Festival Fringe runs from 9 until 27 July. The full programme can be viewed at the Fringe web site.