Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#138): Beth Paterson, NIUISA
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 Beth Paterson to find out more about her show, Niuisa.
1. Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it?
NIUSIA is a one-woman show created by myself and co-creator/director, Kat Yates. NIUSIA is the true and remarkable story of my Nana, Niusia – a survivor of the holocaust who endured 6 years in Auschwitz – and the unexpected journey I take to understand her, and consequently herself. The show really zooms in on the diasporic experience: what it is to form a connection to culture when it was so severely severed by generational trauma, how can my Nana be a hero and a bitch at the same time, and how does this history live on through me?
The inspiration for the show came in the form of a Broadway Belter: it was Patti Lupone singing the pants off a Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien parody that drove me to put pen to paper. This spoof, I Regret Everything, captured me. The laundry list of faux paus, the cherished woe, the drama of it all: everything about it screamed Nana. I hadn’t thought about my Nana Niusia in years, and all of a sudden I was flooded with memories and questions: “Who was this woman? What do I remember of her? How the hell did she survive that? How can I learn more?”. Nana hasn’t left my head since. That was mid 2019.
She was a formidable woman who I sadly never had the chance to meet in full glorious flight. I’m told that she was brilliant: magnetic, whip-crack-clever, and sometimes shockingly cruel. She also threw a mean party. By the time I came along she was fairly unwell, forlorn and pointed–on a good day. Writing NIUSIA was initially a means for me to comprehend my Nana’s complex legacy: hero, survivor, and a grandmother I remember very bitterly.
The audience are introduced to this remarkable and–at times–terrifying woman through my memories, my mother Susie’s voice, and through staged imaginings of some shining moments of her life in Melbourne. My relationship with her memory transforms through the show and the audience journeys with me as I explore what it is to hold complex and often conflicting feelings about your Holocaust-surviving grandmother.
2. What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?
NIUSIA is the culmination of 5 years of work between myself and my key collaborator and director Kat Yates. I approached her in late 2019 with a few sketches of writing, a core concept, and a dream: to take my Nana’s story to Edinburgh Fringe in 2025 for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year is a big year for NIUSIA. We have just returned from the Adelaide Fringe Festival–the 2nd largest open-access theatre festival in the world–with 3 five star reviews, 2 awards, and 2 additional nominations. We’re about to finish the first leg of our regional Victorian tour as a part of the Year 12 Drama Curriculum, and in July we depart for the long-awaited, long-dreamed-for Edinburgh Fringe Festival to present NIUSIA, a work that honours my mother, my nana, my heritage, and the long line of women that came before me, 80th years after the liberation of Auschwitz.
3. How would you describe your show in three words?
heartfelt, humorous, anti-war
4. What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?
I hope audiences will leave feeling jubilant, reflective, and touched. It’s a personal story, but its specificity and exploration of complex feelings has a way of connecting with people of all ages, stages, and creeds. After the show I’ve had audience members tell me they reached out to their grandparents for the first time in years, some leave wanting to explore their own long-neglected backgrounds, and others decide it time to sit their children down and offer to them the family stories. I’d love people to leave having learned something, and wanting to know more about their own stories.
5. What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?
Know what you want out of your fringe experience, and build everything around that. If you try and do it all, you’ll fall in a heap!!
6. Where and when can people see your show?
13:20, The Former Women’s Locker Room at Summerhall Arts (1 Summerhall EH9 1PL), 31st July - 25th August. THEN 31st August in Aberdeen Performing Arts’ International Season at 7pm!
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/niusia
https://festival.summerhallarts.co.uk/events/niusia/
https://www.aberdeenperformingarts.com/whats-on/niusia-international-season-2025/
INSTAGRAM: @BethPatersonAUS and @arypresentation
SHOW LINK: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/niusia or https://festival.summerhallarts.co.uk/events/niusia/
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