Edinburgh Fringe 2026
One House on Brick Lane
Mulberry Theatre Company
Genre: New Writing, Youth Theatre
Venue: TheSpaceUK
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
One House on Brick Lane is an original play rooted in East London by Mulberry Theatre Company. Set in a single house, centuries collide with the voices of past and present. In 1985, a Bangladeshi family faces eviction amid protests. Through stories told by Huguenot weavers of anti-fascist resistance, migration and community struggle, the house reveals its memories. Drawing on oral histories and lived experience, this production asks who gets to belong when home is under threat. Created by young East London voices, it celebrates resilience, humour and collective hope.
Review
Review
Brick Lane in East London has been an area of immigrants for centuries: French Huguenots brought silk weaving and textile skills; the Irish fleeing famine and Jews escaping pogroms brought tailoring; there were breweries and markets, Caribbean people invited to rebuild post-war Britain, Bengalis arriving in the aftermath of Partition… It also has a long history of unrest inflicted by others, from the Battle of Cable Street in 1934 to the National Front marches of the 1970s and 80s. This ambitious production, performed entirely by students from Mulberry Schools Trust in East London, takes that layered history and roots it in one house and one family.
The play opens in 1974 with projection of newsreel onto the brick walls of the set with a verbatim voiceover recalling the fear of the National Front years – the risk of being beaten up simply walking home from work or the shops – before settling into its main story in 1985, around the Hussein family at 60 Brick Lane. The house is haunted, gently and constantly, by the unseen ghosts of everyone who lived there before: the bricklayers, the textile workers, the bakers of bagels and the curry houses. These ghosts observe, comment and occasionally argue among themselves as events unfold – a kind of Greek chorus, drawing the historical threads together.
The three Hussein children are still working through the loss of their father, who died of a heart attack seven years earlier during the 1978 protests against the National Front. Each has found their own way of coping. Eldest brother Bilal (Sakib Sarker Uddin Sultana) works shifts and shoulders responsibilities he isn’t really equipped for; his sister Ariya (Zainab Chad) has channelled her grief into activism, determined to follow in their father’s footsteps; the youngest, Musa (Zahid Shohid Ullah), just twelve, bristles at being treated as a child by his older siblings. Their mother (Yemi Yohannes) is rarely on stage, and her absence is felt as keenly as the two jobs Ariya explains she’s working.
The acting is strong throughout, with particularly impassioned performances from the three central siblings. Each of the ghosts had a distinctive character in keeping with their period but occasionally lacked projection meaning a few good lines were lost.
The set is genuinely ingenious: four rotating sections double as the building’s brick exterior, onto which archive newsreel plays, and the interior walls of the Hussein home – watch closely as they turn and you’ll spot objects hinting at the lives of the twelve generations who passed through this address.
In addition to the set, the overall look of the play is strengthened by the quality of the costumes – huge care has clearly been taken with the historical period costumes.
As the Husseins face eviction, the community rallies to help them find a new home, and at its heart this is a play about community holding firm. It closes beautifully, moving into the present as a new generation of students arrives – into what are presumably now flats – amid a fresh wave of unrest and protest, the story quietly beginning again.
It feels like a story grounded in these students’ experience of life in Shoreditch, something that they genuinely enjoyed researching (even the famous rivalry between bagel shops gets a mention), creating, performing with passion – and becoming part of the history of Brick Lane.
