Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Song Unburied
Rooftop Promotions Trust, Theatre in the Park
Genre: Theatre
Venue: Assembly Roxy
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Song Unburied is a story that follows the appointment of the first black female curator at the British Museum. They are asked to catalogue artefacts from her home country. She discovers a cleaner from home, Zimbabwe, who wants to support and help her in the cataloguing. Meanwhile the disturbing of the bones of ancestors follows a figure that haunts our principal protagonist throughout. She is also dealing with the death and burial of her beloved grandmother.
Review
Rooftop Promotions Trust and Theatre in the Park have toured extensively around Africa and brings Song Unburied to Edinburgh for a limited run. It has gathered a lot of support and applause during those runs.
Here it sits slightly uncomfortably as the structure of it at times leaves you a little confused by where things are heading. Tone and pace can be quite fast and the mythical and otherworldly figures intrigue but don’t truly deliver enough menace or connection to the storyline to really fit or make you uncomfortable.
The narrative of the British Museum was interesting, and we got elements of it rather than fully rounded characters who could hold our attention. There was much more in the cleaner, the protagonist and the Museum Manager which offered glimpses of people with fascinating backstories, but it was a little lost. Reparations is such a hot topic, the connection to ancestry is massive within our western culture I was looking for a bit of education and help. It felt a little disjointed at times.
The importance of the grandmother, however, became significant and came across. The curator being unable to attend the funeral had poise and angst. That the grandmother had given the curator her name provided the conflict enhanced by her relationship with the bones and traditions of the earth that she is being asked to catalogue, was the beginning of connection that you felt was seeking to emerge.
The actors have a sense of strong spiritual emotions with the ritualism gaining presence through a creature that emerges out of the curator. There is plenty in here I wanted to know much more about and felt I was lagging behind the storyline because I did not have that.
By the end we have a form of resolution insofar as material is being returned and plans are being made but the strength of the message – we have to give respect to our ancestors is a little lost.
The set suggests domesticity and work with a central lane for performers to use when in neither. The museum door is odd. Everybody had to dip underneath because it was in the basement but not much was really made of that.
There were explosions of dance and song but these felt like additions rather than central to the plot or storyline.
Song Unburied has a very strong connection to the past and Zimbabwe. It has toured to places where there is a resonance and a culture that connects with it. Where I agree with them is it does leave you uncomfortable and wanting to know more, I think that my feeling of being uncomfortable had less to do with the confrontation of my ancestors having exploited theirs than the methodology on stage to confront me.
