Local club and childhood haunts form backdrop to Fringe debut
A playwright who grew up in Bonnyrigg has turned memories of Saturday nights at Dalkeith Miners Club into the centrepiece of her debut show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. The dark comedy, written by 27-year-old Kari Hall, follows a 19-year-old partygoer whose life is upended after a sexual assault, forcing her to confront the emptiness beneath a hedonistic exterior.
The work, titled Hame. Teeth. CLUB., is not presented as a factual recounting, but Hall has drawn closely on the dialect, places and people of Midlothian. As Hall told a local paper, the inspiration included evenings at the Miners Club after Saturday shifts at TK Maxx and a sense of the club as a uniquely local social institution.
“A lot of people find it funny that it’s set in Dalkeith Miners Club, because it’s such a part of the nostalgia of growing up in Midlothian,”
Hall recalls the venue as both “casual and laid back” and, at times, “mental” — part grandfather’s birthday party, part raucous local nightclub. The choice of setting is deliberate: for many young people in the area, Dalkeith offered an affordable night out when a taxi into town was beyond means. Hall said with typical local frankness that you could go there “with a fiver”.
Personal history and artistic intent
Hall, who moved to London in 2020 to study drama and now works as a chef while running a theatre company supporting Scottish and other Celtic artists, wrote the play in 2023. The writing process was driven in part by anger following a sexual assault in London — a traumatic event that the playwright has channelled into the fictional Morgan Shields who must reckon with being believed by others yet feeling abandoned.
Despite the serious subject matter, Hall has framed the piece as dark comedy, rooting humour in recognisable local detail: the Miners Club, Bonnyrigg hill and the TK Maxx at Fort Kinnaird all feature as locations within the play. Those references are likely to resonate with Midlothian audiences who will recognise the landmarks and the rhythms of suburban social life that Hall portrays.
- Title: Hame. Teeth. CLUB.
- Author: Kari Hall (Bonnyrigg native, aged 27)
- Themes: youth culture, sexual assault, nostalgia, local identity
| Local feature | Role in the play |
|---|---|
| Dalkeith Miners Club | Primary social setting; emblem of local nightlife |
| Bonnyrigg hill | Backdrop; part of geographical identity |
| TK Maxx at Fort Kinnaird | Referenced as part of coming-of-age routine |
The play’s use of Midlothian-specific detail is more than a veneer: it is a deliberate attempt to “put Bonnyrigg on the stage”, giving voice to an experience and dialect too often sidelined in national cultural conversation. That localisation is likely to carry double value — offering Midlothian audiences the particular satisfaction of recognition while providing Fringe-goers from further afield with a vivid picture of a Scottish commuter town’s social life.
For local cultural life, the appearance of a Midlothian-set piece at the nation’s largest arts festival is notable. It underlines the ways in which smaller towns feed the creative ecosystem and how local memories can be transmuted into nationally visible work. The production also contributes to ongoing conversations about how comedy and drama can address difficult issues such as sexual assault without diminishing lived experience.
Hall’s background — adolescent years spent socialising at the Miners Club, a move to London for drama school in 2020, and current work in both the culinary and theatrical sectors — echoes a common contemporary pattern of outward migration for training and employment, coupled with a sustained artistic engagement with home. The play’s presence at the Fringe provides a platform for that engagement to reach a wider audience, and for Dalkeith and Bonnyrigg to be seen, in all their particularity, on one of the world’s most visible cultural stages.
As the Fringe season unfolds, local audiences will watch with interest to see how a script shaped by Midlothian nights and a complicated personal history is received by the wider public.
