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GRIDLOCK Drama to Make Edinburgh Fringe Debut This August

Director Dominique Mabille and writer Kathryn Mincer discuss the drama's origins in relationship compromise.

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Featured Topic Edinburgh Festival More Coverage GRIDLOCK Drama to Make Edinburgh Fringe Debut This August

GRIDLOCK, a new drama centered on a couple stuck in traffic while confronting the fate of their seven-year relationship, is set to make its Edinburgh Fringe debut in August.

The play unfolds between a tense present-day car ride and a series of flashbacks and confessions that reveal how small, accumulated hurts shape a relationship's future. GRIDLOCK is scheduled to run at Gilded Balloon (Patter House, Coorie) as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Gridlock follows a couple stuck in traffic on the way to an appointment; what begins as petty frustration quickly pulls them, and the audience, into a collection of flashbacks, confessions and long-buried fears as they try to decide whether their seven-year relationship can survive. The play moves between the close, claustrophobic present in the car and vivid memories that reveal how small hurts accumulate into larger questions about shared futures. It is a razor-sharp domestic portrait that asks how well we can ever know one another after years of small compromises. Theatrical, immediate and emotionally candid.

Gridlock doesn't tell audiences what to think. It asks them to sit with two people in an impossible moment and hold both of their truths at once. It is a play about the conversations we keep putting off, and what happens when we finally can't. Audiences leave not with answers, but with something rarer: the desire to talk. To reach out. To see the person across from them a little more clearly. Gridlock is for anyone who has ever loved someone they couldn't quite reach.

Speaking about the play, Director Dominique Mabille states: 'Gridlock is a show about how the smallest moments can tell the largest truths - about love, fear and the work of staying with someone. We wanted to keep the audience right inside those fractured memories, so every choice feels urgent.' Writer Kathryn Mincer adds 'everyone who has been in a relationship that didn't work out will relate to this on some level. It's about the compromises that we make in a relationship, and how those compromises do not always work the way we planned.'

KD Film Productions is a female-driven, award-winning production company based in London and Scotland. With a background in film, the company brings a cinematic eye and a commitment to authentic, character-led storytelling to everything it makes. GRIDLOCK marks KD Film Productions' Edinburgh Fringe debut, and represents the company's first step in developing the work across stage and screen.

Director Dominique Mabille has said the production aims to keep audiences immersed inside the characters' fractured memories, while writer Kathryn Mincer has described the play as an exploration of the compromises made within relationships. GRIDLOCK marks the Edinburgh Fringe debut for KD Film Productions, a London and Scotland-based production company, and represents its first venture into stage work following a background in film.

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