Book Club: From Wandsworth to Edinburgh

How Kate Bromage brought her play, Book Club, to the Edinburgh Fringe.

In 2020, as the world was going into lockdown, I found myself curled up in a chair, notebook and biro in hand, madly scribbling. There was no plan, no framework, no narrative direction, not even a title. I just grabbed a pen and let the voices of a group of very normal, if not slightly eccentric people, take over.

At the time, I was (and still am) a proud member of New Stagers, a South West London theatre group. Through this, I co-created and co-produced Scene Unseen in 2016, an annual production designed to encourage new writing as part of Wandsworth Fringe. It gave me, along with others, a rare opportunity: a low-stakes, supportive space to write and see our work come to life in front of an audience.

Book Club started life as a short play for Scene Unseen. At the time, I assumed that was all it would ever be, until people started telling me how much they liked it and how they wanted to spend more time with the characters. It went on to win Best Short Play at New Stagers’ biennial awards, which made me realise it might be something worth exploring further. So I sat back down and let the voices of Linda, Gemma, James, Susan and Bob take over once more.

In February 2023, I premiered my full-length version of Book Club at the Bread & Roses pub theatre in Clapham to sell-out audiences. The feedback blew me away. I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I was just an amateur theatre girlie, who liked to write. This was just another bit of writing right…?!  

Then the lovely Pat Driver at Rye Players asked if her group could read it at an upcoming read-through. This was swiftly followed by a request to perform it at the Rye Arts Festival. I felt hesitant, partly about letting go of my baby, but more so about whether, in front of a group of strangers, the play would survive the scrutiny.

In September 2023, I sat squeezed into a sell-out audience in The Mermaid Pub in Rye, to watch my play. And it was my play. There were Linda, Bob, James, Gemma and Susan. Played by a different group of talented actors (including professional actress Hayley-Marie Axe), directed by someone that wasn’t me (the very talented Pat in fact), but they were still the characters I recognised and it was still the play I had written, and people still seemed to love it; really love it. I was introduced as the writer, and people I’d never met, and who had no obligation to, came up to tell me how much they loved my play and how I should take it to Edinburgh. It was amazing… It was also really overwhelming. 

Book club was performed one last time by Rye Players. At a charity performance in October 2023 at the Ellen Terry Barn Theatre at Small Hythe, where it once again was met with rave reviews. That was the last time Book Club was performed. There were requests that came in from other amateur groups asking to read Book Club and maybe perform it. But I wasn’t quite ready to let my play out there so widely and so freely, I felt hugely protective of it and as if I hadn’t quite achieved what I had set out to, yet. Which, for a good while, wasn’t much at all.

In 2024, I tentatively entered Book Club into the Birmingham Rep Victoria Wood Playwriting Prize for Comedy, where I was told “out of a total of 557 plays submitted, it reached the top 50 plays, meaning it was within the top 9% of all entries.” Not that I expected to win, but at the time I saw this as the end of the road for my play, time to let it rest and move on, focus on my non-creative career and keep my writing to fun short plays for Scene Unseen.

Across those years, I had been a fairly regular attendee of the Edinburgh Fringe, a place that felt completely magical to me, and a world I was desperate to be part of. I had always harboured dreams of taking a play there, and subconsciously I had written Book Club to be “Fringe friendly”, with a small cast, portable staging, and minimal technical requirements.

But I never seriously considered taking it myself.

I just didn’t think it was something people like me had permission to do. People who did theatre as a side hobby, who were not considered “professionals”, could not just wake up one day and decide to take their play to Edinburgh, could they?

In 2025, I watched fellow New Stagers, led by Alice Collins, do exactly that, taking their brilliant version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Edinburgh. It was the wake-up call I needed. That, and the fact I went to the Fringe that year and cried, realising I had never given myself, or my play, the chance to be there too. I had well and truly got in my own way.

And then my friend and fellow writer Veronica Motalbetti decided that 2026 was the year she would take her show, Long Story Short, to the Fringe, and gave me the final shove I needed, so we joined forces and decided we would do it together.

So here I am, two weeks out from my London previews of Book Club. Full of imposter syndrome, backed by an extremely talented cast, a hugely supportive crew, and of course my lovely New Stagers.

If you want to follow Book Club on this exciting journey, we open at The Bread & Roses on the 1st May, with a final London preview taking place on the 25th July. Then on the 16th of August we board a train to Edinburgh, to finally take Book Club to the Fringe. I can’t wait. Strap in.