Award-winning ensemble Out Of The Forest Theatre returns to the Edinburgh Fringe with Bury The Hatchet, a razor-sharp retelling of the Lizzie Borden story. Starring writer-performer Sasha Wilson, the show fuses bluegrass murder ballads with biting satire and gallows humour.
This darkly comic folk show reopens America’s most notorious unsolved murder case, asking urgent questions about media, misogyny, and the stories we choose to believe. With a cast of Fringe favourites and direction by Vicky Moran, it promises a thrilling theatrical experience.
Bury The Hatchet runs from 30 July to 25 August 2025 (not 12th) at 15:50 at the Pleasance Dome (Queen Dome). Tickets available here.
You’re bringing Bury The Hatchet to the Pleasance Dome – what can you tell us about the show?
Bury The Hatchet is a true crime podcast meets bluegrass musical about Lizzie Borden, America’s favourite maybe-murderess. Andrew and Abby Borden are found dead on the morning of August 4th, 1892. Their daughter Lizzie is the main suspect.
Tried but acquitted of the crime, the story goes she wielded the axe that killed them. Come for the axe, stay for the harmonies. It’s a true crime fever dream with live music, unreliable narration, and an ensemble cast who switch roles faster than you can say “Wait, didn’t she just die?”. It’s our second fringe after the 5*, also award winning The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria.
We’re resurrecting this blood-soaked Off West End Award winning gem because nothing says “summer fun” like Victorian repression, family resentment and unsolved murder.
Bury The Hatchet revisits the infamous Lizzie Borden case – what drew you to this story, and why now?
I’ve always had a soft spot for badly behaved women—and a deep impatience with the parts on offer for them. When I left drama school (please don’t ask how long ago), I realised I wasn’t seeing the roles I wanted to play. So when I remembered that just down the road from my hometown was the scene of one of the greatest unsolved murders in American history, I grabbed a metaphorical axe and started chipping away at the research to write a play of my own.
Bury The Hatchet isn’t about whether Lizzie Borden actually murdered her father and stepmother. It’s about why we think she did. Why we needed her to. Why we continue to project stories onto women in the public eye until their identities collapse entirely under the weight of our own voyeurism. Was she too emotional? Not emotional enough? Did she perform her innocence in the wrong register?
After our great success with The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria in 2023, we wanted to come back to Edinburgh and we felt that it was the perfect moment to dig up the hatchet. Lizzie Borden may be long dead, but the culture that made her infamous is still very much alive.
In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, conversations about women’s bodies, choices, and autonomy have once again become headline fodder—as if our personhood is a topic for polite public debate. But these dynamics don’t just play out in courtrooms. They’re embedded in our media, our storytelling, our assumptions.
I’m not here to endorse murder, obviously. But I am interested in what happens when a woman is left with no agency, no voice, and no acceptable way to express her rage. What systems failed her? And why are we so quick to turn her into a spectacle?
The show blends bluegrass murder ballads with dark humour – how did that unique style come together?
Necessity, a recession, and an unchecked appetite for the macabre. When I first dreamed up the show (several global crises ago), Out Of The Forest Theatre wasn’t a thing yet. What I did have was a handful of drama school mates, a pathological interest in women who behave badly, and the naïve gall of someone in her early twenties who thinks a fringe show about axe murder might just be the ticket.
I was also, critically, broke. So I bought a frock, borrowed some props, and asked myself: how can I transport the audience to 1892 and make a Victorian parlour murder feel alive on a shoestring? The answer: murder ballads and Appalachian folk tunes. Mercifully, I now have my partner in crime, the marvellous producer Claire Gilbert, who balances the books and makes sure that I don’t spend the entire production budget on a cursed Victorian mourning dress off Etsy.
As for the dark humour – ask my therapist.
You’ve described your plays as “Trojan Horses for your politics” – what themes are you smuggling into this one?
Women in the public eye remain our favourite bloodsport. If there’s one thing more lucrative than elevating a woman to untouchable heights, it’s the inevitable feeding frenzy when we rip her to shreds. The Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial wasn’t so much a legal proceeding as a global reality show, where the crucial test of credibility wasn’t forensic evidence but whether she cried the correct amount. Too much? Manipulative. Too little? Clearly lying. And God forbid a woman wear the wrong dress to the wrong event—an act tantamount to treason in the court of public opinion.
So yes, Bury The Hatchet follows the course of the crime, its investigation, the trial and it’s outcome, but it’s really about a woman’s guilt or innocence playing out in the pages of newspapers, telegraphed breathlessly across continents to satisfy an audience with a bottomless appetite for scandal.
Out Of The Forest Theatre has a reputation for bold, ensemble-driven storytelling – what’s it like working with this team again?
The beauty of working with a creative team you know inside and out is the shorthand: a glance, a breath, a raised eyebrow — that’s a whole conversation. We know each other’s tastes, bad habits, worst impulses, and best ideas. We work fast, ravenously, and with the kind of joyful chaos that only comes from genuine trust and years in the artistic trenches together.
I’ve been making work with David Leopold since 2017 — he was one of the first people I collaborated with after moving to the UK. Since then, we’ve done somewhere in the region of a hundred shows of Boris alongside Lawrence Boothman, and Zoë MacKinnon has cued them all with timing so sharp it should probably come with a safety warning.
This time, we’re adding some serious firepower to the mix. Director Vicky Moran is piecing together the production like a seasoned detective at a crime scene, every clue, motive and dramatic beat accounted for. Costume Designer Helen Stewart has costumed the piece with forensic attention to detail and wit – think Victorian silhouette with a touch of rock’n’roll.
Lighting designer Will Alder is painting Damien Stanton’s set (something between a murder parlour, a gallows, and a front porch where you might sit and swat flies as the summer heat curdles everything around it) with mood, tension, and just the right amount of unease.
And none of it would even make it past the “mad idea in a Google Doc” stage without our glorious producer, Claire Gilbert — master of logistics, champion of artists, and the only person I trust to tell me I cannot buy another historically accurate petticoat. She keeps the whole circus from catching fire.
That kind of intimacy – forged over years of rehearsal rooms, tours, lost props, tech panics, curtain calls, and pub debriefs – creates real theatre magic. We move as one. And when we step onstage, that alchemy starts humming.
It’s rare, it’s precious, and honestly? It’s just so much fun getting the band back together.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Bury The Hatchet?
I hope you get swept up in the foot-stomping bluegrass tunes, pulled into the antic whirlwind of multi-rolling mayhem – and somewhere in the middle of all that theatrical chaos, find yourself questioning your own assumptions. About guilt. About innocence. About what an “upstanding woman” should look like, sound like, behave like.
It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s messy – just like the justice system. And if you leave without at least considering whether you too would snap in a house with no indoor plumbing, then frankly I’ve failed.
