From Bristol to Edinburgh: Late Shift Theatre Steps Up with Take Care

In little more than a year, Bristol’s Late Shift Theatre sold out its debut, tackled medical misogyny in its second production and prepared its first show for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Producer Millie Thomas speaks to Tilly Marshall about a young company finding its voice.

In the fifteen months since Late Shift Theatre was founded, this young Bristol company has made two successful comedies about subjects rarely given enough attention, the first of which sold out its debut production and is now ready for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Established in May 2025 by producer Millie Thomas, Writer and Director Edie Doherty, and head of marketing and design Rosy Brown, Late Shift creates work rooted in lived experience.

Its debut, Take Care, follows six members of staff working on New Year’s Day in a care home for adults with learning disabilities. While their friends and families celebrate elsewhere, the colleagues contend with awkward conversations, unexpected emergencies and the personal pressures they have carried into work.

Inspired by Thomas’s own experience in care, the play finds humour, tension and companionship among people doing essential work that often goes unnoticed. Its ensemble cast features Li Friess, Milo Gray, Eloise Greenacre, Maddi Jabir, Charles Hubbard and Charlie Warwick.

Late Shift first staged Take Care at Bristol’s Alma Tavern Theatre in October 2025. Both performances sold out, an extra row was added and Thomas surrendered her own seat to watch from the technical area.

“We were overwhelmed by how much people connected with the characters and the storylines,” she recalls. “People got quite emotional and were cuddling up to their friends. There were some big laughs as well.”

That response revived an earlier ambition. Before the script was complete, the team had pitched Take Care through the University of Bristol’s Theatre Society as a possible Fringe production. The project was not yet ready, so they staged it independently and assumed the Alma run would be the end of its journey.

Then audience members began asking whether the company might take it to Edinburgh after all.

“It’s a really nice full-circle moment,” Thomas says. “That was originally what we thought we might do with Take Care. Now we’re getting to do it in a much more prepared and fully fledged way.”

Late Shift has developed alongside the play.

Its second production, In Hysterics, opened at the Wardrobe Theatre in March.

Drawing on Doherty’s own experience, it explored medical misogyny through the stories of two women struggling to be heard by doctors a century apart. A modern patient seeking treatment for recurring migraines was placed alongside a woman in the 1920s whose symptoms were dismissed as female hysteria.

Simon Bishop’s StageTalk review praised the production’s blend of anger, “cringe and hilarity”, and the way its contemporary and historical stories exposed how little some attitudes have changed. Many women today still say they feel dismissed when seeking medical help.

Read his review here: https://stagetalkmagazine.com/p/39133

Placed alongside Take Care, the production reveals a clear thread in Late Shift’s work. Both plays begin with lived experience, focus on people whose voices are too easily overlooked and use comedy to draw audiences into serious subjects without making light of them.

Making In Hysterics also gave the company greater confidence and discipline. Thomas affectionately describes the group behind its debut as “a very lovely but perhaps slightly disorganised gaggle”.

“When we first did Take Care, we were learning how to run a company at the same time as putting on the play,” she says. “We perhaps didn’t have as much time and energy to be as critical with it as we have been this time.”

That experience has shaped the production travelling to Edinburgh.

Thomas says the Bristol version ran for around 90 minutes. At the Fringe, where a longer show means higher venue costs, Late Shift has cut it to one hour to make the run financially feasible.

It is a substantial reduction, but Thomas believes the tighter version has clarified what mattered most.

“We’ve retained the narrative arc and the core events,” she says. “It’s more concise, which allows those real moments the audience connected with to shine.”

The physical production has become leaner too. The entire set and its props must fit inside Thomas’s Volkswagen Polo, alongside Thomas and her suitcase.

Getting the company itself to Edinburgh has required similar resourcefulness. The Take Care Team’s Trek to Fringe has seen its members collectively walk, run, swim and cycle the 600-kilometre distance between Bristol and Edinburgh.

At the time of speaking, Late Shift was around £300 short of its £2,000 fundraising target towards accommodation for the cast and production team.

“You just don’t realise how many hidden costs there are to taking something to the Fringe,” Thomas admits.

Only a year after presenting its first production, Late Shift will arrive in Edinburgh with a sold-out Bristol debut, a well-received second play and a growing body of work that finds comedy in places where it might not be expected, and bringing too often neglected stories into the spotlight.

Take Care reaches the Fringe shorter, sharper and backed by the audience response that persuaded the company it had further to travel. For three young Bristol theatre-makers who began by putting on the play themselves, that journey is already worth celebrating.

Take Care runs at the Space at Surgeons’ Hall from 24 to 29 August at 4.05pm.

Photography credit: Rosy Brown