Strawmoddie strikes ten
Scratch Night at St Brides
Edinburgh’s grassroots theatre company Strawmoddie celebrates its tenth anniversary this week with a Scratch Night including script-in-hand extracts from its first four productions.
The evening, at the St Brides Centre on Orwell Terrace on Thursday 30 October 2025, will also include extracts from work it is putting on next year, including Beth Henley’s sizzling southern noir Crimes of the Heart, due to play the Roxy in March 2026
Posters for Vaults, Foxgloves and The Boat.
Company founder Jonathan Whiteside told Æ that some of Strawmoddie’s earliest company members will returning for the night, which will encompass new writing by members of the company, which it hopes to stage in the future, literary adaptations, modern classics, Shakespeare, songs “and much more”.
Strawmoddie rose from the crypts of the ruined Whithorn Cathedral in Autumn 2015 and was initially formed to stage new horror writing of a site specific nature. The first play Vaults was written after Whiteside spent a season working in a Museum in Whithorn, Galloway, next to a ruined medieval cathedral with intact crypts – which the locals said were haunted.
paranormal investigation gone bad
“Along with four friends from my High School drama group we scared the audience half to death with a paranormal investigation gone bad,” remembers Whiteside. “And thus Strawmoddie was born.
“The show was revived in Edinburgh at Halloween in 2017 in the Banshee Labyrinth, part of the old Niddry Street Vaults, also haunted, as part of the Edinburgh Horror Festival and with a brand new cast (and me, forever playing a student) we sold out and toured the play back to Whithorn to the very Vaults that first gave it life.”
The cast of The Boat on the Lochrin Belle. Pic: Jonathan Whiteside.
The thrill of scaring people prompted Whiteside to dust off the 2014 script of Foxgloves, which he had workshopped with Stage to Page in Glasgow and developed further through mentoring with playwright Jo Clifford as part of Playwrights Studio Scotland.
Foxgloves had a basic, rough-and-ready staging at the 2018 Edinburgh Horror Festival and was revived at Assembly Roxy in 2019 with a more expanded set for the Formation Fest.
The play finds an estranged brother and sister returning one last time to the family farm, to sift through the junk left from a lifetime that has no other place to go. But it’s more than just memories they unearth, they discover a dark family history that should have stayed buried forever.
“The play is based on my own experiences growing up on my grandparents’ far less haunted sheep farm in Galloway, which is called Strathmaddie,” says Whiteside.
“Which actually answers the most commonly asked question, the name of the company. The name Strawmoddie comes from a map from the 1400s that I found in the Whithorn museum, as the name given to my grandparents farm back in the mists of time.”
ambitious
One of the company’s more ambitious productions was The Boat, written by Whiteside and his friend Kristofor Bate, which combined Bate’s idea for a Scottish zombie TV show and Whiteside’s “logistically ridiculous” idea to stage the play on a boat.
The “site specific zombie horror”, staged on the Lochrin Belle, the barge berthed at the Union Canal Basin, Fountainbridge, sold out immediately. The Boat follows four survivors of a zombie apocalypse surviving on the sea between the Western Isles in the ruins of civilization.
The cast of Conspiracy. LHS: Joseph Cathal, Nick Thorne, Tamas Fazakas, Chris Allan and Alistair Lawless; centre: David Taylor, Jonathan Whiteside and Matthew Jebb, standing: Sinclair Davies; RHS: Chris Pearson, Ben Blow, Timothy Bond, Ray Fortune and Martin Molloy. Pic: Robin Mair
Strawmoddie’s fourth production, Show Pony, was staged as part of Formation Festival in 2019 with script development and direction from Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir, as a rehearsed reading of a work-in-progress script devised by Michelle Hodkin with playwriting mentoring from Whiteside.
Also rising from the dead at the Scratch Night will be a script which has overtones of the Dracula myth, which was supposed to be staged at the 2021 Cymera festival but succumbed to Covid pandemic.
vampirism
The idea was Matthew Jebb’s, based on executives in New York swapping out or transfusing their blood for the blood of young healthy people.
“It just screamed Dracula to me,” says Whiteside. “We wrote the script remotely together during Covid and were one day away from staging it at Cymera Festival in 2021 when many of our cast came down with… sadly not vampirism, but covid.”
Nicholas Thorne, Jonathan Whiteside, Caitlin Carter, Hilary Davies and Ben Blow in Amadeus. Pic: Robin Mair Photography
Since then, the company has taken two very divergent paths.
Firstly it has taken on relatively straight theatre. In 2023 Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was staged at the Central Hall, Tollcross, where it rather succumbed to the echoing nature of the venue, despite some fine performances according to Æ’s review.
There were no such problems with the company’s revival of RFT’s production of Loring Mandel’s Conspiracy at the Fringe in 2024. A chilling production that we said caught the horrors of the off-hand decisions that led to the Holocaust.
And then, this April, the company staged Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in the round at the Pianodrome’s tiny, 75-seat circular wooden amphitheatre, with only a grand piano for set, which Æ said was a powerful examination of the jealousy of mediocrity in the face of genius.
Terry Pratchett
The second strand has taken the company into the magnificence of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
“My friend Kristofor Bate introduced me to this world back in 2020 in preparation for staging Guards! Guards! at that years Cymera Festival,” says Whiteside. “But due to the pandemic our first visit to the Discworld was postponed for three years until June 2023 when something magical was born.
“Taking over the role of director (my first time alone in the director’s seat) we began work on what would become one of our most enjoyable productions and lead to a string of follow up shows.”
Gregor Dickie and the cast of Going Postal. Pic: Robin Mair.
The company has gone on to stage five more Terry Pratchett adaptations: Hogfather, Men at Arms, Going Postal, Feet of Clay and Monstrous Regiment. This Christmas it will be taking on The Fifth Elephant, in a production at the Pleasance Theatre.
While these two strands have given big popular pieces of theatre an intimate staging – and heft to what some might see as “genre” theatre in the case of Pratchett – by returning to its earliest work and looking towards new work from the company, the week’s Scratch Night shows Strawmoddie as a company which is at ease with its roots as it ever was.
Strawmoddie Scratch Night
St Brides Community Centre, 10 Orwell Terrace, EH11 2DZ
Thurs 30 Nov 2025
Evenings: 7.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Terry Pratchett’s The Fifth Elephant
Pleasance Theatre, 60 Pleasance, EH8 9TJ.
Thurs 4 – Sun 7 Dec 2025
Thurs – Sat: 7.30pm; Sat/Sun 2.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Crimes of the Heart
Assembly Roxy, 2 Roxburgh Place, EH8 9SU.
Thursday 19 – Sunday 22 March 2026
Thurs – Sat: 7.30pm; Sun: 2.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
ENDS
