Belfast playwright Stacey Gregg has won a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for her play Scorch.
Produced by Belfast's Prime Cut Productions, directed by Emma Jordan and starring Amy McAllister, Scorch tells the story of Kes, a teenager grappling with gender identity. Kes meets Jules online and they embark on a relationship - but Jules thinks Kes is a boy.
Having followed 'gender fraud' cases in the media, Gregg told RTÉ Culture that she decided to write her own "fictional account".
"Once the second case involving a teen happened I knew I wanted to write about it," she said. "Every subsequent case has been sensationalised in the media and I thought there were more complex ways to think about them, without undermining the victims involved."
Scorch received its world premiere at the Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast last November and won the award for Best New Play at the Irish Times Theatre Awards earlier this year.
The Fringe First Awards are voted for by the reviewers of The Scotsman newspaper and give a big boost to a production's international profile. In its review of Scorch, The Scotsman said Gregg's "beautifully-observed script, delivered directly to the audience, captures the joy of someone able to talk about their sexuality for the first time, but also reveals the story behind this".
"It's come as a total surprise; it's like 'the little play that could'," continued Gregg. "The win is incredible for Amy and Prime Cut, and will hopefully open a conversation with wider audiences about the ideas in the play, some of which people may not have ever encountered or thought about.
"We've been overwhelmed with the number of people wanting to talk or share stories after the play - people with personal experience, people who work with kids or in the legal profession. Sometimes people feel upset, too, but the play asks questions - it doesn't tell anyone what to think or feel."
Irish audiences will have a chance to see Scorch when it goes on tour in September and October. Another of Gregg's plays, Override, receives its Irish premiere at next month's Tiger Dublin Fringe.
"It's about a relationship in which a secret surfaces," she explained. "It's about love and ideas of perfection and desire."
Earlier this week, Dublin comic Al Porter was nominated for a Best Comedy Show award at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, which are commonly known as 'the comedy Oscars'.
Porter's show At Large, which he has been performing to sold-out crowds at the Fringe, is one of just eight shows to be nominated for Best Comedy at the awards, which take place this weekend.
Tallaght-born Porter follows huge Irish comedy names such as Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan, who were both previously nominated for the award.
