Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#113): Sasha Wilson, BURY THE HATCHET
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 Sasha Wilson to find out more about her show, Bury The Hatchet.
1. Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it?
I’ve always had a soft spot for badly behaved women—and a deep impatience with the parts on offer for them. When I left drama school (several global crises ago), I realised I wasn’t seeing the roles I wanted to play. So when I remembered that just down the road from my hometown was the scene of one of the greatest unsolved murders in American history, I grabbed a metaphorical axe and started chipping away at the research to write a play of my own.
Bury The Hatchet isn’t about whether Lizzie Borden actually murdered her father and stepmother. It’s about why we think she did. Why we needed her to. Why we continue to project stories onto women in the public eye until their identities collapse entirely under the weight of our own voyeurism. Was she too emotional? Not emotional enough? Did she perform her innocence in the wrong register?
We treat women like Lizzie Borden the way we treat all women who break the mould: as puzzles to be solved, creatures to be feared, anomalies to be punished. They’re thrilling. They’re unknowable. And that terrifies us.The mythology around her—this shifting, grotesque, enduring fiction—has metastasised over 150 years into a cultural obsession we can’t seem to put down. That’s what drew me in. The theatre of it. The ambiguity. The axe and the aftermath.
2. What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?
We had such a fantastic time bringing The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgariato Pleasance Queen Dome in 2023 it felt like the perfect space to bring Lizzie back.
In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, conversations about women’s bodies, choices, and autonomy have once again become headline fodder—as if our personhood is a topic for polite public debate. But these dynamics don’t just play out in courtrooms. They’re embedded in our media, our storytelling, our assumptions.
I’m not here to endorse murder, obviously. But I am interested in what happens when a woman is left with no agency, no voice, and no acceptable way to express her rage. What systems failed her? And why are we so quick to turn her into a spectacle?
Bury The Hatchet asks what it means to live in a world that consumes women rather than listens to them. Lizzie Borden may be long dead, but the culture that made her infamous is still very much alive.
3. How would you describe your show in three words?
Unsolved. Unhinged. Unmissable.
4. What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?
I hope they get swept up in the foot-stomping bluegrass tunes, pulled into the antic whirlwind of multi-rolling mayhem—and somewhere in the middle of all that theatrical chaos, find themselves questioning their own assumptions. About guilt. About innocence. About what an “upstanding woman” should look like, sound like, behave like.
We’re not here to hand out answers—we’re here to crack open the door and let the doubt in.
5. What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?
Book a couple of days post-Fringe to sit quietly by the sea, stare into the middle distance, and try to remember your real name. Ideally: no talking, no networking, and absolutely no flyering.
Just you, lots of carbs, and the slow return of your personality. Consider it your artistic decompression chamber. You’ve earned it
6. Where and when can people see your show?
At the Pleasance Theatre Queen Dome 3:50pm every day of the Fringe (except for Tuesday 12th, because we didn’t want our bluegrass to clash with brit pop)
INSTAGRAM: @outoftheforeattheatre
SHOW LINK:https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/bury-hatchet
READ MORE FROM THE FRINGE..
