A theatre show about a woman institutionalised in 1960s Australia has won the 2024 Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Batshit, by Leah Shelton, is a vivid and very personal requiem for Leah's grandmother Gwen, who, like many other silenced women in the early to mid-20th century, was judged to be mentally ill after expressing unhappiness about her family life.
Batshit, playing throughout August at the Traverse Theatre, was one of five shows to be shortlisted for the Mental Health Foundation's annual Fringe Award, presented in recognition of compelling new work about mental health at the Edinburgh Fringe. The award is currently sponsored by the Cornwell Charitable Trust and dedicated to the memory of arts journalist Tim Cornwell, who died in 2022.
The other shortlisted shows were:
In Two Minds (Traverse): Written by Joanne Ryan and produced by Irish company Fishamble (previously nominated in 2023 for King), In Two Minds sensitively portrays the challenges of living with bipolar disorder through the turbulent relationship between a mother and daughter who have to share a home during a house renovation.
make the Bed (Zoo Playground): Ariela Sidney Nazar-Rosen's minimal, sometimes wordless one-woman show powerfully transports the audience deep inside the private world of a young woman experiencing severe anxiety, as she becomes fixated on the idea that her house is infested by bedbugs.
300 Paintings (Summerhall): Comedian Sam Kissajukian's account of how he created 300 paintings during a five-month long manic bipolar episode is an ingenious, funny and insightful exploration of the relationship between mental illness and creativity.
Flicker (Pleasance Dome): Like last year's award-winner Choo Choo!, this new show by Gaby Foley, HFH Productions and Bethany Cooper Productions finds an ingenious and original way to talk about living with OCD - in this case through the medium of a hilarious bedroom farce, created in consultation with OCD UK.
The Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award was established in 2017 in recognition of the most compelling new work about mental health at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Its previous winners are: Mental by Kane Power (2017), Electrolyte by Wildcard (2018), All of Me by Caroline Horton (2019), Manic Street Creature by Maimuna Memon (2022) and Choo Choo! by StammerMouth (2023).
The award is presented by the Mental Health Foundation in partnership with the Scotsman newspaper, for whom Tim Cornwell worked for many years as its arts correspondent. More recently Tim was part of the judging panel for the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award, a subject close to his heart as someone living with Bipolar disorder. Tragically Tim died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism in June 2022; he had just finished editing A Private Spy, a collection of letters by his father, the author John Le Carre, a task for which he would receive much acclaim in the months after his death.
“Tim was a terrific and often underrated writer, on almost any subject you could think of; he was also very open about his mental health struggles. He was a valued member of the judging panel for the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award, a task to which he brought both his personal insights and his many years of experience as an arts journalist. We are very grateful to the Cornwell Charitable Trust for offering to support this award; it feels like a fitting tribute, celebrating both Tim’s long relationship with the Edinburgh Fringe and his achievements in reducing the stigma around mental health.” – Andrew Eaton-Lewis, arts programme officer, Mental Health Foundation.
Mental health has become an increasingly prominent theme at the Edinburgh Fringe over the past few years, with more and more artists making brave, honest and boundary-pushing work on the subject. The Mental Health Foundation set up its annual award in order to recognise, support and encourage new creative work that challenges mental health stigma, asks difficult questions, and opens up conversations.
Thanks to the support of the Cornwell Charitable Trust, the winner of the 2024 award will be offered a £3k cash prize plus a flexible package of support tailored to the future development of the show and other related work about mental health.
The Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award is part of the Foundation's year-round arts programme, which also includes the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, one of the world's biggest mental health themed arts festivals, taking place across Scotland each October.
