The Fringe Five | Emma Howlett

Emma Howlett of TheatreGoose, author and director of Aether at Summerhall

Emma Howlett, who works under the aegis of the company TheatreGoose, made her Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2023 with Her Green Hell, a disorienting one-woman play about zoologist Juliane Koepcke’s extraordinary survival of an 11-day ordeal in the Amazon rainforest in 1971.

The Bath-born, Oxford-educated, London-based writer and director returned in 2024 with Sisters Three, a metatheatrical romp through historical trios of women, from the Gorgons of Greek mythology to the weird sisters of Macbeth to the Sugababes.

Both were impressive, but Howlett’s third fringe show, Aether, is on another level, and confirms her as one of the most intelligent artists working at the festival.

Over an hour, Aether weaves together several stories of women investigating the unknown. In fifth-century Egypt, the astronomer Hypatia defies male criticism to lecture on the movement of the planets. In 19th-century London, the medium Florence Cook faces down sceptics who accuse her of fraud. A few years later in New York City, vaudeville performer Adelaide Herrmann astounds audiences by performing six bullet-catches in a row. And in contemporary Cambridge, a brilliant PhD student – the show’s only fictional character – frets about the endless frontiers of science.

‘Emma Howlett’s Aether confirms her as one of the most intelligent artists working at the fringe’

All this is conjured up by a superbly shapeshifting cast – Sophie Kean, Abby McCann, Anna Marks Pryce and Gemma Barnett – in a fluid, fast-moving staging incorporating a curved blue curtain, an old-school overhead projector, a rotating platform and an array of unlikely props. The result is a thrillingly theatrical, dazzlingly clever meditation on quantum physics, humanity’s obsession with discovery and history’s habit of forgetting female scientists. It is Stoppardian – and compliments do not come greater than that.

Howlett has had limited luck so far in transferring her shows from the Edinburgh Fringe elsewhere. This stunningly intellectual hour should do the trick.

Discover the other Fringe Five 2025 winners here