Multi-award-winning Ellie Keel Productions (The Stage Producer of the Year 2024) and Atticist return to Edinburgh Fringe in a co-production with Hampstead Theatre, and with a sublime finalist from the Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2024 – the first play by Royal Court-backed writer Daisy Hall. BELLRINGERS was one of the Final Five plays shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2023, selected from 1,001 submissions.
The mushrooms are encroaching, fish are falling from the sky, and in a belltower Clement and Aspinall are waiting for lightning to strike. Superstition says that the ringing of church bells can dispel a storm. When it feels like the apocalypse is here, anything is worth a shot in this stunning debut play about love, community, and being young at the end of the world.
Debut playwright Daisy Hall explains, I’m so excited that BELLRINGERS is coming to Edinburgh. The first ideas for this play began to come together during the long hot summer of 2021. Back then BELLRINGERS felt like such a personal exploration of the fears and hopes that characterized that time and it has been so wonderful to see that the play resonates with other people, including a brilliant creative team who are able to bring it to life. To me this play is about the persistence of love in an imploding world, and I am looking forward to sharing that story with audiences.
Director Jessica Lazar (SAP) comments, BELLRINGERS is the extraordinary debut of a writer who is going to become a leading voice in British theatre. It sings with tragic inevitability swaddled in irrational, irrepressible hope – a hope that just might be triumphant after all. It is a play that, with the world as it is, in so many ways, I think we need to see.
Atticist, Ellie Keel Productions and director Jessica Lazar last collaborated on SAP by Rafaella Marcus, which debuted with an award-winning run at Roundabout before a sell-out transfer to London’s Soho Theatre and a national tour. SAP won Summerhall’s Lustrum Award, Soho Playhouse Medal of Excellence, The Stage Edinburgh Award (Jessica Clark), and the Off West End Award for Most Promising New Playwright (Rafaella Marcus), as well as being a finalist for the Holden Street Theatre Award and an OffFest Edinburgh Award nominee.
Other shows by EKP and Atticist have won also the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award (Life According to Saki), The Stage ‘Fringe Five’ (Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz), Summerhall’s Lustrum Award (An Interrogation) and The Stage Edinburgh Award (Collapsible). EKP’s The Swell (co-produced with the Orange Tree Theatre and Damsel Productions) was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre, and for the Off West End Awards for Best New Play, Best Production, and Best Director.
