Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#145): Marty Breen, BITCH

As anticipation builds for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, we’re catching up with a range of exciting creatives preparing to bring their work to the world’s largest arts festival this August. In this series, we delve into the stories behind the shows, the inspiration driving the artists, and what audiences can expect. Today, we’re joined by Marty Breen to find out more about BITCH.

1. Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it?

BITCH is a tragicomedy fake open mic - it’s a play in disguise. We sold out our first run with waiting lists when it premiered at the Dublin Fringe Festival last year, winning the Best Performer and Spirit of the Fringe award, as well as being nominated for Best Production and Best New Writing. It’s made with the most incredibly talented team, including Jeda de Brí, HK Ní Shioradáin and Suzie Cummins (if you want to look at their past impressive work), and I’m both incredibly proud of it and terrified to bring it to new audiences.

It is a cathartic, dark, hopefully funny exploration through standup, drag and acerbic original songs of punch-down humour, resenting your identity, and what we allow to happen when we laugh. It’s an open-mic battle: one character through a red-flag laden set, another through a cabaret world at the piano. It came out of having two brothers, and wanting to have the tough, heavy conversations I don’t know how to have with them any other way. It’s silly, scary and ruthlessly honest. I can’t say much more about it, as the whole point is it’s something you go through with our characters, but if you liked Nanette, NATE, or any other interrogatively intense shows posing as comedy, you’ll be well up for BITCH.

2. What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?

I had had the idea for years of playing with these forms to tell a frustratingly prevalent narrative (which is told in every area but comedy mostly, bar some of the inspirations for the show: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, Natalie Palamides’ NATE and Daniel Sloss’s X), but recent reckonings in the Irish comedy and theatre scenes around power, gender and when is a joke not funny anymore made it feel timely to tell it this way. And Edinburgh is the pipe dream for any new work!

3. How would you describe your show in three words?

Brash, ballsy tragicomedy.

4. What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?

You’d really have to ask the audience, but I hope they feel they’ve gone on an identifiable journey and they’ve come out the other side the way the main character does, asking questions about what we think makes people likeable or unlikeable. I also hope they have a cracking time for most of it. BITCH is, above all else, playing with the boundaries of comedy. We have to laugh, or we might die, as the opening says. And I really hope we do laugh - it’s a wild ride, that takes the audience to unexpected places, but hopefully the form of comedy and cabaret being laced with dark undertones gives them the warnings they need.

5. What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?

This is my first time doing the Fringe on my own, but I’ve been over before for a week with the Dublin all-women & NB comedy improv group Broad Strokes. We had an absolute ball with Laughing Horse, had really wonderful packed houses, and got a taster of some of the best and worst of flyering and freeFringe! But I’ve never done a run this long, or Fringe somewhere like Pleasance, so I’ll be hungry for advice from anyone who wants to give it.

6. Where and when can people see your show?

Pleasance Jack Dome, 28th July-25th August, 2.45pm!