Bury The Hatchet is a razor-sharp true crime retelling of the Lizzie Borden case by award-winning Out Of The Forest Theatre. Blending dark humour, murder ballads, and biting social commentary, this satirical ensemble show explores media sensationalism, gender bias and the truth behind America’s most infamous unsolved murder. Did she do it—or did we just want her to? Pleasance Dome (Queen Dome) from 30th July – 25th August 2025 at 15:50. Buy your tickets here
1. Thank you for chatting with A Young(ish) Perspective! Introduce us to who you are and what your doing at the Edinburgh Fringe this year?
My name’s Sasha Wilson. I’m a LAMDA-trained Bulgarian-American actor, writer, and Artistic Director of the multi-award-winning Out Of The Forest Theatre. I’m also the author and one of the ensemble cast of Bury The Hatchet, which we’re taking up to the Pleasance Queen Dome this summer.
2. A Youngish Perspective platforms accessible arts and champions the huge scope of different perspectives – can you tell us about the show you’re taking to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as if you’re flyering to both a young first-time-Fringe goer and a festival veteran returning every year?
Bury The Hatchet is a true crime podcast meets bluegrass musical about Lizzie Borden, America’s favourite maybe-murderess. Andrew and Abby Borden are found dead on the morning of August 4th, 1892. Their daughter Lizzie is the main suspect. Tried but acquitted of the crime, the story goes she wielded the axe that killed them. Come for the axe, stay for the harmonies. It’s a true crime fever dream with live music, unreliable narration, and an ensemble cast who switch roles faster than you can say “Wait, didn’t she just die?”. It’s our second fringe after the 5*, also award winning The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria.
We’re resurrecting this blood-soaked Off West End Award winning gem because nothing says “summer fun” like Victorian repression, family resentment and unsolved murder.
3. Lizzie Borden is an iconic figure in American folklore. how will Scottish and international audiences be able to connect and understand the cultural indicators throughout the piece?
Lizzie Borden may be a uniquely American figure, but the forces that shaped her story are depressingly universal. A woman on trial not just for a crime, but for failing to behave the way a “respectable” woman should? That transcends national borders.
Most people know Bob Dylan or Simon & Garfunkel – and even if you’re not a fan of the music necessarily you’ll find yourself recognising a tune or too. True Crime also transcends borders – I’ve never been to Scandinavia or Australia but blimey could I recite a fascinating tale.
Scottish and international audiences might not have grown up reciting the Lizzie Borden rhyme on the playground, sure, but they’ll know the type: the woman who didn’t cry correctly, who didn’t grieve prettily, who didn’t make herself small or soft enough to escape suspicion. The culture of scrutiny, of projection, of turning women into cautionary tales or public entertainment—that’s not an American problem, that’s a human one.
4. You describe your plays as being Trojan Horses, how does Bury the Hatchet go further than skin deep?
In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, conversations about women’s bodies, choices, and autonomy have once again become headline fodder—as if our personhood is a topic for polite public debate. But these dynamics don’t just play out in courtrooms. They’re embedded in our media, our storytelling, our assumptions.
I’m not here to endorse murder, obviously. But I am interested in what happens when a woman is left with no agency, no voice, and no acceptable way to express her rage. What systems failed her? And why are we so quick to turn her into a spectacle?
Bury The Hatchet isn’t about whether Lizzie Borden actually murdered her father and stepmother. It’s about why we think she did. Why we needed her to. Why we continue to project stories onto women in the public eye until their identities collapse entirely under the weight of our own voyeurism. Was she too emotional? Not emotional enough? Did she perform her innocence in the wrong register?
Ultimately, the show asks what it means to live in a world that consumes women rather than listens to them. Lizzie Borden may be long dead, but the culture that made her infamous is still very much alive.
5. Who would your surprise dream audience member be?
Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five, a revelatory reconstruction of the lives of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. What’s so extraordinary about Rubenhold’s work is not only the meticulous research but the profound empathy she brings to it. She restores these women to history not as corpses, but as fully realised people with hopes, families, failures, and inner lives.
If you were to Google them, the first images you’d likely see are their post-mortem photographs—stripped of dignity, paraded for public titillation. For over a century they’ve been flattened into a single, dehumanising narrative: that they were “just prostitutes,” and therefore somehow complicit in their own brutal ends. Rubenhold dismantles that with care and clarity, offering instead five deeply moving portraits of women failed by the systems around them—first in life, and again in death.
I share her commitment to excavating the woman behind the myth. In my own work, I try to do the same: to look past the headlines and the hearsay. So yes, if she came to see the show? That would be a dream come true.