Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Book Club
New Stagers
Genre: Theatre
Venue: Haldane Theatre at theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Grab your wine, nibbles and notebooks and get ready to join Linda and her fellow “book clubbers” as they attempt to dissect the classics. This award-winning comedy explores the idiosyncrasies of a mismatched group brought together (through Linda’s heavy persuasion) by their love, or mild interest, in books. As they journey through the novels, free-flowing wine and endless crisps, one question remains: can this motley group of strangers actually become friends? And what exactly is a cheese puff?
Review
I walked into New Stagers’ Book Club and left having recognised almost everyone I’ve ever known in one room. The piece trusts you to recognise yourself in its people. We all know someone that’s represented here. The genius of the script is that these aren’t caricatures; they’re excavations of types we’ve bumped into in real life, the ones who make us groan and then somehow end up mattering to us.
Each character snaps into focus immediately, claiming their own distinct flavour of awkwardness or obliviousness. And the audience is onside from the first laugh.
What’s striking is how the show refuses to punish its characters for being exactly who they are. Linda’s pushiness is funny, yes, but it’s also the thing that holds them together. The others aren’t being mocked for their indifference to literature; they’re being celebrated for showing up anyway, for trying, for letting themselves be drawn into something like Linda’s book club.
The performances are consistently sharp. There’s genuine chemistry between the cast; they move around each other with the ease of people who’ve found their rhythm together. Individual moments land precisely: a look, a hesitation, the way someone reaches for wine at exactly the right moment.
Technically, the director has done something genuinely clever with constraint. A large cast on a small stage could easily feel cramped or chaotic, but instead there’s real elegance to it. The minimal set becomes almost invisible once the scene settles; it simply marks out the living room and lets the cast of characters breathe. Everyone has their own space, and you never feel like anyone’s been squeezed in. It’s the kind of staging choice that disappears in the best way; you don’t notice you’re not looking at realistic furniture until you realise it’s gone.
For a debut script, this is bold and genuinely funny work. There’s a confidence here, a real instinct for how these people speak and move together. The writing doesn’t falter under its own ambition, and that’s rarer than it should be. This is the kind of first play that signals a bright future.
Where the production stumbles slightly is in transitions. Some scenes lumber when they might dart, and the shift to the new house isn’t quite clear the first time it happens. What I can say is that the scene changes are hilarious, executed under blue light. You wish you could see the full comic choreography of it. These are small things.
What matters is that the production gets the fundamental things right: it knows that what makes us laugh is how much we recognise, and what makes us stay is knowing we’re not alone. There’s real warmth underneath the jokes, not sentimental, not treacly, just genuine affection for these people and their fumbling attempts to connect through books and wine and the simple fact of showing up.
By the end, everyone wants the “book club” to continue. The audience wanted it too, wanted to stay in that living room with these people who suddenly felt like friends. That’s the mark of something that works and this is a must see in your fringe scheduling.
