Why this year’s Edinburgh fringe was so obsessed with death

The Edinburgh Festival is finally over, but why was this year’s event so obsessed with dying? Death is the new Black, at least according to the artists at the fringe where our mortality has been eviscerated, diced, disembowelled, deconstructed and fed back in a torrent of death shows to an army of avid theatre goers ever hungry, it seems, for new interpretations of our predictable demise.

Death Suits You, When We Died, You are All Going to Die, The Last Show Before We Die, Hello Kitty Must Die, and the Dead Dad Show are just a few of the catchy morbid show titles proudly performed in defiance of the usual theatrical sales logic that death is a stinker.

The official Edinburgh International Festival got in on the death act too, with the unremittingly grim National Changgeuk Company of Korea’s production of the Trojan Women, staged in Korean. During this bleak show, the last female survivors of Troy are told to willingly accept their future fate as slaves, concubines and play toys of their Greek conquerors after the murder of their husbands.