Fringe First award-winning writer Tom Brennan returns to the Edinburgh Fringe with Overtone, a gripping new play exploring love, memory and the lasting impact of formative relationships. The production marks a major new collaboration with The North Wall.
Told through a non-linear structure, Overtone follows a couple forced to confront the influence of their past when a familiar figure resurfaces. The play examines how early experiences and power dynamics continue to shape identity and connection.
Overtone runs at Pleasance Dome (Jack Dome) from 5–30 August 2026 (not 12, 19 or 26) at 14:40. Tickets are available here.
You’ve written Overtone, which is coming to Pleasance. What can you tell us about the show?
It’s a two-hander about a woman and a man. We jump back and forth between their time in a competitive choir when they are fifteen, and a dinner when they are in the middle of their lives.
It’s a love story, a psycho-drama, a comedy in places, a memory play, a bit of a mystery thriller, a kind of ghost story maybe? Oh God. Describing your own work is hard, isn’t it?
It’s about figuring out who you are when you’re a teenager and the relationships that form you. It’s about realising the person you’ve become. It’s about long-term relationships, regret, rage, roleplay and romance.
Overtone explores a long-term relationship shaped by past experiences. What drew you to tell this story?
Well, that would be telling.
The play uses a non-linear structure to move between past and present. How did you approach crafting that on the page?
In the first draft, I would jump between the past and the present all the time, because I would learn about the characters as I wrote. Moments in the present would inform the past and vice versa.
But then I had to start treating the two timelines like two separate plays that I had to write separately. They have very different rules and tones. The past has this propulsive energy. Both characters are always trying to say exactly what they mean. The characters are so passionate and hopeful.
Then, when we hit the present, communication becomes more complicated under the years of baggage that the characters share. It was a lot easier to write the past than the present. I find beginnings are always more difficult than middles.
But it feels so important that they make sense across the vast expanse of time that the play covers. Each scene has to propel the audience across time, like memory.
The story touches on power dynamics and formative relationships. What conversations were you hoping to spark with audiences?
I return to themes of power, sex and the past a lot in my work. I find them endlessly fascinating and complex.
I hope audiences might talk about the many ways that make healthy, functioning adult relationships. We are messy creatures. No relationship is the same, and finding out what we need from each other is hard, important work.
You’re returning to the Fringe with The North Wall. What has that collaboration brought to the development of this piece?
The North Wall is a theatre that has always created a safe place for me (and many others) to take bold risks.
With Overtone, they have trusted, encouraged and challenged me to write exactly what I want to write. They are a brave theatre that believes in all the important stuff with this project: the rigour of character, story, form and production.
They’ve pushed me to go deeper with the characters and richer with the ideas.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Overtone?
To be clear, it’s not your duty to see new plays. You don’t have to eat your greens out of some kind of weird cultural obligation.
But this team are incredible, with a proven track record of amazing work. And new plays like this are rarer and rarer, so it’s a chance to see a proper piece of theatre with super actors doing proper acting.
It’s a play that might make you think differently, might make you raise your heartbeat and might make you feel a little bit more in tune with your pasts and the person you are now.
