Day 3: Under-the-sea exploits on stage

Himali Kothari

August 4, 2025
5 min read

What happens when what started on the “fringe” takes centrestage?

It becomes a global celebration of everything art. For 78 years, the cobblestones of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe have witnessed the move of the margin to the mainstream. …And this year, it will also give volume to the 50 curated climate narratives that refuse to stay silent.

Storyteller and Arts Enthusiast Himali Kothari reports from Edinburgh.

Day 3: The first two days I walked around the city with open-eyed wonder. Turrets, spires, and domes dominating the sky, brass plaques embedded in walls and pavements, pastel-walled shops at the base of stone-brick buildings… the city presents itself as the setting for drama. The wonder has abated a little—or perhaps the eyes have grown accustomed to the dreamy Edinburgh cityscape.

Yet, I stop in my tracks when I turn a corner and see a blue man scaling the wall of The Waverley Bar. It takes a few moments of staring to ascertain that it is a life-size statue, not an actual man, swathed in blue fabric. A Google search reveals that a few years ago, the figure appeared overnight on the wall of the century-old bar without any explanation. The unknown story of the ‘blue man on the wall’ continues to invite speculation. One Facebook post claims that it is a “homage to people who would scale the Flodden Wall (built to defend the city against invasions) because they could not afford the toll at the Nether Bow Port.”
But the lack of a clear reveal keeps the intrigue alive.

CTA: Futuristic Settings and Rewriting Fairytales

Today’s CCTA program is preceded by an immersive performance by Siho Park. Park invites the audience to gather around her as the backdrop creates an illusion of being under the water. For the next 20 minutes, Park shares with us her journey as a scuba diver. What started as a desire to be among the creatures of the sea develops into a full-blown passion as she tots up dives in the waters around the world. She encounters many beautiful beings in the depths, but one that she longs to meet eludes her—a whale. After sixty dives, she gives up. Some months later, she learns of a whale sighting. She gets to the spot, only to discover that the whale is dead. Cause of death: human debris in the ocean which had rotted its insides.
“What can I do? I wish I could swim with them and tell them not to eat the junk in the water. But I can’t,” she says.
Park’s story ends with a resolve to make a difference for her favourite being—from land.

There are a few reasons I am excited about today’s CCTA collection. One, it features friend and fellow Mumbai theatrewallah Nikhil Katara’s play The Mermaid. The play is set in a futuristic world where false narratives have forced humans to believe that they are mermaids and cannot breathe on land. The play suggests that truth should be held above all else. Katara has been a part of the CCTA programs since 2019 and has also created other short films to highlight the climate crisis.
“Art has the power to shift mindsets and spark action — not by prescribing solutions, but by helping people feel the weight of what’s at stake,” he says on the role of art in tackling climate change.

Today’s line-up also features one of my all-time favourite CCTA plays, Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Laila Pines for the Wolf. The play tells the story of Red Riding Hood from the perspective of the wolf. But there is a twist—the wolf is struggling to survive because of climate change. The play ends with the wolf unable to cross from the island to the forest, which is now more of a clearing, because the water in between no longer freezes.
“The last thing I hear is a cry from the island. It’s the wolf,” Laila says to the audience.
It is a resounding last line that sticks.

A comedic monologue Snowflake’s Special by Kevin Matthew Wong wrenches the audience out of Laila’s world. Irish director-actor Maria Tivnan, in a sparkly dress and blue eyeshadow, plays Special, a snowflake who is on a selfless quest to make humans smile. Wong’s words and Tivnan’s spirited delivery manage to accomplish the mission for the humans in the audience.

All the performances today have been tied together through a narrative by Fife-based playwright Wren Brian, whose play Now brings down the curtains on today’s CCTA program. A lyrical piece, the playwright has left the staging entirely to the artist. That level of confidence is admirable in a writer, and one which I aspire to reach someday. In today’s performance, it takes the form of a stunning tango performance as the words of the writer scroll down on the backdrop.