Edinburgh Fringe shows beamed into cinemas
An Edinburgh Festival venue is to beam five new short plays into cinemas across the UK in a first for Scottish theatre.
The Traverse Theatre is to broadcast the shows from its season of breakfast theatre live into cinemas.
A one-off, back-to-back performance of all five plays will take place on Monday.
The event will be filmed by Hibrow and beamed live to Picturehouse and other participating cinemas across the UK.
Specially commissioned scripts by Marina Carr (By the Bog of Cats, Marble), David Eldridge (Market Boy, Under The Blue Sky, Festen), Linda McLean (Any Given Day, strangers, babies), Simon Stephens (Punk Rock, Pornography) and Enda Walsh (Hunger, The Walworth Farce) will each have just one day of rehearsal before performances during this year's breakfast theatre season, Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
Traverse artistic director Dominic Hill said: "This exciting project celebrates the fact that people are accessing theatre in new ways, and also de-mystifies the process of bringing a script to life.
"We are capturing the essence of what we do at the Traverse, and are delighted to bring the work of these five exceptional writers to a much wider audience through the live broadcast.
"It will give people across the UK the chance to connect with the Traverse studio experience, and discover something brand new at the festival."
The 2010 breakfast theatre season, Impossible Things Before Breakfast, kicks off with Simon Stephen's dark road trip show, T5, directed by Hill.
It is followed by Marina Carr's Quartet, a tale of a man's relationship with his wife, his mistress and his lover over 30 years, directed by National Theatre of Scotland artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, who will also direct Enda Walsh's My Friend Duplicity.
Linda McLean's This is Water has interrogations of 18 people as they pass through a hut on the side of a hill, and is directed by Stewart Laing.
David Eldridge's short play about the fragility of existence, All Is Vanity, is directed by Zinnie Harris.