Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Apples in Winter
LynchPin Theatre
Venue: The Annexe at Paradise in The Vault
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Miriam’s son has been on death row for 22 years. At midnight the state will execute him. His last request: his mother’s apple pie. As Miriam bakes the perfect pie, this one-woman play by Jennifer Fawcett invites us to reflect on the impact of violent crime on its hidden victims.
Review
The set is a kitchen. Within a few minutes we realise this isn’t an ordinary kitchen, but one inside a prison, where Miriam is making an apple pie – the last meal for her son, Robert, facing execution after twenty-two years on death row. Everything she needs is laid out in containers, plus three apples. It’s the wrong time of year for apples, she says; they won’t be as good.
As she measures, rubs in the butter (never anything but butter), and finally adds water to make the shortcrust, she talks about the apple tree in their garden, the one that produced the best apples, and how Robert always loved her pies. They were close, mother and son – she describes an idyllic childhood.
The pastry goes into the fridge to cool; there is much to be learned about good pie-making in this show. She turns to the apples, apples that aren’t as good as the ones from the tree, aren’t as good in winter. Picking up the knife brings her back sharply to the prison kitchen: it’s chained to the unit, so she patiently rearranges the worktop to accommodate the short chain, only find, frustratingly, that the knife is blunt. She adds her own mix of cinnamon and nutmeg, the combination Robert likes best, and reveals that the warden has told her the men often find they can’t eat their requested final meal at all -she hopes the smell of apples and spice might at least carry him back to childhood.
And the shortcrust comes out of the fridge.
With each stage of the making and baking, Claire Parker’s light touch direction sets up another layer of the story, we learn a little more of Robert’s childhood: his schooling, his poor relationship with his father, his gradual descent into drugs and crime to feed the habit, until finally Miriam reaches the night itself – the night he killed two young people, the night that led, inexorably, to this one.
Jennifer Fawcett’s writing is penetrating, unflinching, gentle and agonised by turns, a work of layers, each peeled away as Miriam peels away the apples. We encounter grief, loss, guilt and the question every mother must ask when faced with a child who has committed any crime: ‘what did I do wrong?’
Edie Campbell takes us on an emotional journey from practical mother, doing her best for her son, the tension held in check by focusing on the one thing she can still do for him: bake. Gradually, the questions surface – the confusion, the regret, the guilt – in a heartbreaking performance of a loving, distraught mother.
As the clock counts down towards five o’clock, the time the pie must be ready, the wait for it to bake comes to mirror the wait for that final moment. The tension builds, supported by Elisabeth Tooms’s subtle lighting design that charts the play’s evolving moods. and Campbell shows us a woman for whom everything she thought she knew, everything she has managed to hold together for twenty-two years and more, is finally coming apart.
A must-see: a stunning performance in a powerful, unflinching play.
