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EPISODE · Aug 12, 2026 · 42 MIN

The best theatre at this year's Edinburgh Festivals

from Front Row · host BBC Radio 4

Australian writer and performer Hannah Reilly talks to us about her much-anticipated one woman show about sex, power and authenticity, Roleplay, which is produced by the team behind Fleabag and Baby Reindeer and which has sold out in Edinburgh but is heading to London for a run in the autumn. Critic Fergus Morgan talks us through the other shows which are making a splash at this year's Edinburgh Festivals - from a radical sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which stars Golden Globe-winning actor Wagner Moura, and in which 12 members of the audience are brought on stage to deliver a verdict in A Trial, to a reimagining of Virginia Woolf's The Waves - presented to audiences in a sauna. The first international exhibition from Alabama's Legacy of Slavery Museum has come to Edinburgh this month, and we're joined by its founder, eminent lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson to talk about how it depicts the international slave trade and racial brutality over centuries. We're also joined by writer and director Zora Howard whose powerful production Hang Time sees three performers talk about their lives and loves as they appear to be hanging from a tree, and which is inspired in part by the deaths of two men in Southern California in recent years. And director Louis Paxton talks to us about debut feature film The Incomer, which opens this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival tomorrow night. It's a darkly comic fable in which an awkward council worker (played by Domnhall Gleeson) is sent to a remote Scottish island to relocate a pair of siblings (Gayle Rankin from GLOW and Grant O’Rourke from Outlander), to the mainland, but let's just say things don't quite go to plan. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Crossan

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The best theatre at this year's Edinburgh Festivals

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