Beth Paterson brings the internationally acclaimed NIUSIA to Edinburgh Fringe 2025 following award-winning runs in Melbourne and Adelaide. This deeply personal solo show explores the legacy of Holocaust survival, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of cultural identity.
Through a blend of storytelling, memory, and humour, NIUSIA examines what it means to inherit history and how we remember those we never truly knew. Paterson’s performance is raw, honest, and unflinchingly human.
NIUSIA runs from 31 July to 25 August 2025 (not 11th or 18th) at Summerhall (Former Women’s Locker Room), 13:20 daily. Tickets are available here.
You’re starring in NIUSIA at Summerhall – what can you tell us about the show?
NIUSIA is the true and remarkable story of my grandmother, Niusia—a Holocaust survivor—and the unexpected journey I took to understand her, and in turn, myself. It’s a one-woman, verbatim show that ultimately serves as a love letter to family and a reckoning with the effects of intergenerational trauma. It’s a poignant look at the special—if sometimes difficult—relationships between grandmother, mother, and granddaughter, and how trauma can shape, stretch, and strain those bonds. I weave together the historical and the personal, the traumatic and the hilarious, to take the audience on a journey of self-discovery, cultural euphoria, and connection to the past. And yes—there’s a lot of humour. The show leans into Jewish gallows humour to explore incredibly dark material with levity and grace. The audience is invited to laugh along with me, as I discover that sometimes, laughter is the only way to survive the unsurvivable.
NIUSIA explores complex family histories and intergenerational trauma. What inspired you to tell this particular story?
Thoughts about who I was and where I came from had been brewing for a while. I’d done the classic Aussie pilgrimage to Europe and was confronted by the physical proximity of WWII history—the kind I’d only ever seen in books or films. I walked around Krakow with Polish in my ears and my jaw on the cobblestone street: I’m in my Nana’s motherland. Around the same time, I saw an adaptation of Merciless Gods by Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas. I had quite a difficult experience with it. I remember thinking, “I don’t look like anyone on stage. I’m a white lady, right?” But the tense relationships between parents and grandparents, and the vastly different worlds the generations inhabited, resonated deep within me. That show hit me like a tonne of bricks. It propelled me to think about where I come from and how I identify: Jewish? White? Second-generation refugee? Privileged? These identities—often framed in opposition—were all rolling around in my head, refusing to be neatly reconciled.
And then came Patti LuPone. I saw her perform a parody of Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien—called I Regret Everything—and something cracked open. The drama! The wailing! The laundry list of regrets and grievances—everything about it screamed Nana. My mum and I laughed until we cried… and then cried until we laughed. Questions bubbled out of me until Mum tired and pushed me out of the house and into my car. I pressed for more stories down the front steps and up until the moment my car door had been (lovingly) slammed shut. I left that afternoon buzzing with stories and fuzzy memories. I drove away that afternoon buzzing—with stories, with fuzzy memories, and with the very first spark of what would become NIUSIA.
Nana hasn’t left my head since. That was mid 2019.
The show blends memory, interviews, and cultural reflection. How did you approach weaving these elements together on stage?
At first, it was just Kat Yates, my co-creator/director and me. I spent Melbourne’s notorious 2020 lockdown writing short vignettes from my own memories and imagined scenes from my nana’s post-war life in Melbourne. In early 2023, everything shifted. We assembled a sensational production team, I recorded a long-form interview with my mum, and the show exploded open. Her voice brought a whole new depth and texture — suddenly, we had three generations speaking through the work. From there, we layered in the writing I had generated, and our incredible design team helped us create a world that could flit between my Nana’s living room, to a liminal memory space, to a 1960s dress shop and so on to mirror the experience of memory itself: scattered, non-linear, full of contradictions. What held it together was the emotional throughline — a granddaughter trying to understand where she comes from. It’s less a history lesson and more a live excavation of personal and collective memory, with books flying, stories colliding, and questions bubbling to the surface.
You never leave the stage during the performance. What has that experience been like for you as a performer?
It’s an absolute treat, really. The creative team absolutely understands what we’ve been making, so as the sound design rises with music or my mother’s voice, the lighting shifts or dips, and I am gifted moments of pause within that weave that support not only me as a performer, but also the pacing and shape of the work.
The show touches on themes of identity, remembrance, and survival. What reactions have you received from audiences so far?
Honestly, the real show begins after the show. Coming out to the foyer to talk to audience members and hold council as they offer to me their reflections, stories, and what the work brought up for them is such a privilege. NIUSIA was selected to be on the high school drama curriculum, so we recently wrapped a tour around regional Victoria that saw heaps of school kids come through. And wow — after every show, I’d hear from folks of all ages and backgrounds who felt “not Jewish enough,” or not “Italian enough,” or “Greek enough,” or “Indigenous enough” to really own that part of themselves — sometimes not even in their own minds. Some young people quietly shared that they had relatives in the camps but didn’t know if they were Jewish or not because the family history had never been talked about. And older women would open up about the desperate rush to capture their elders’ stories before they were lost forever — stories that maybe didn’t seem important until suddenly it was close to too late. It’s messy, it’s complicated, but it’s real, and it’s exactly the conversation I hoped NIUSIA would spark.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see NIUSIA?
Expect to laugh loudly as I fumble through being maybe-sort-of Jewish, gasp in horror as I reckon with my nana’s history working under Josef Mengele in Auschwitz, and cry, smile, and remember your own family stories. You might even begin to query what you do and don’t know — and realise you probably know more than you think. You’ll leave moved, uplifted, and gently nudged to reflect on your own history. Come along!
