Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#162): April Hope Miller, FLUSH

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 April Hope Miller to find out more about FLUSH.

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

“This cubicle, it’s like a confessional. If I tell you my sins, will you buy me a drink?”

Set in the heart of a Shoreditch club, FLUSH unfolds entirely in the women’s bathroom – a space of eyeliner touch-ups, whispered confessions, and fleeting connections. Over the course of one night, stories slip between the cracks of the cubicles: teenage drama, thirty-something fatigue, love, loss, career spirals, sex, motherhood, bad dates, and worse decisions.

Hope has just experienced something she can’t quite name yet. As she hovers between shock and clarity, the bathroom becomes a strange kind of shelter – where strangers offer tampons, stories, and the occasional unsolicited life advice.

A fast-moving, ensemble comedy-drama told in fragments and flushes, FLUSH captures the blur of being many things at once: bold, fragile, furious, absurd. An ode to the women who hold your hair back, hype you up, and sometimes just hand you loo roll.

What inspired the show: 

I really wanted to depict women truthfully, without judgement and in their most unfiltered form and it occurred to me that the ladies bathroom was perhaps one of the only places where women seem to feel comfortable and safe enough to bare their souls and connect to each other. Every woman has a story from the ladies bathroom; be it a notable conversation, a new friend, a drama.

I, like so many women, have overheard countless conversations in the bathroom where friends and strangers have exchanged compliments, tears, laughter and rage about their hateful exes and I just could not stop thinking; what IS IT about this space that facilitates this level of connection and sisterhood. I became fascinated by the womens toilets and the dramatic potential they held to depict real, caring, complicated women who sometimes behave irresponsibly.  

It also occurred to me that many of my friendships have had defining moments in toilets. I remember a number of nights at university with people who are now some of my closest and dearest friends, huddled in a toilet cubicle holding hands and divulging parts of ourselves we didn’t even know we had the courage to admit. In that space, and with those women, for some reason, we felt we could. Those moments are so important to me and the fact so many of my friendships were made and elevated in toilets says an awful lot. 

Despite what many rom-coms would have you believe, women, in fact, have so much depth. I know. Who would have thought. They are wonderfully flawed, chaotic, empathetic and brilliantly absurd. In storytelling women so often don’t get to be all these things and if they do they are often judged for them, as femininity always seems to be set and quantified through the male gaze. I wanted to explore the complexity of women, and the ladies bathroom seemed like the perfect place to do that truthfully and without judgement.

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

 Now more than ever, with figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Andrew Tate occupying the zeitgeist and proving that being a sex offender doesn’t need to have consequences if the right men are in charge, women NEED work that celebrates the power and beauty of sisterhood. We need portrayals of real women who do not spend their life bending to the whim of men and we need work that highlights the way society and the patriarchy has failed young girls. We need art to hold offenders accountable, to support survivors and, fundamentally, to celebrate and uplift women.

The Fringe is THE place to bring new work. We are a new company with a debut play and we want to bring this show to as wide an audience as possible  

4. How would you describe your show in three words?A 

Bold, Hilarious, Moving

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

I hope audiences will leave with the knowledge that they are not alone and feel empowered and comforted by the sheer joy and depth of sisterhood. For women, I want them to leave with a sense of pride and strength and for men I would like the show to elicit a sense of admiration for women and all they are and all they go through. 

I hope FLUSH goes some way to allow audiences to see themselves in at least one of the characters and know that whether it's silly fleeting thoughts or conversations, or something much more serious, you are not alone, you are supported, and women rule the world. 

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

Don’t fu***ing panic.

7. Where and when can people see your show?

WHERE: ‘Upstairs’ in the Pleasance Courtyard

WHEN: 30th July- 25th August (excluding 11th and 18th July)