A derelict east London boozer has become the unlikely inspiration for one of the most talked-about new plays at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, with The Jolly Fisherman bringing the story of a real Barking pub to the stage in a sensitive and thought-provoking drama about what happens when a community loses its local.
The Jolly Fisherman in Barking sat empty for five years before news broke two years ago that a Muslim charity had stepped in as a prospective buyer, with plans to transform the former pub into a community space free from alcohol. For a building that had served as a social hub in east London for roughly 150 years, it was a moment that captured something much bigger than just a property deal.
Playwright John Dinneen took that real-life story and turned it into something deeply human. Rather than using the situation as a political football, the play digs into the messiness of friendship, belonging, and what community actually means when the people making up that community start to look different from one generation to the next.
The production, currently running at Underbelly on George Square, does not go for easy answers. The closure of a pub is rarely just about bricks and mortar. For many working-class communities across England, the local has always been more than somewhere to get a pint. It is where people mark birthdays and funerals, where arguments get settled and friendships get made. When those places disappear, something harder to name goes with them.
Barking itself sits in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, an area that has seen significant demographic change over the past two decades. It is a place where old and new communities exist side by side, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not. Dinneen uses the pub closure as a lens to look at those tensions without resorting to caricature or cheap drama.
What makes the play work is its restraint. There are no villains here. The characters who mourn the loss of the pub are not painted as reactionary or small-minded, and the incoming community is not presented as a threat. Instead, the drama sits in the uncomfortable space between two sets of people who both have legitimate claims to the same patch of east London.
The performances have been drawing strong reactions from audiences, with the tight script giving the cast plenty to work with. The story moves between past and present, weaving together memories of nights at the Fisherman with the reality of its boarded-up windows and uncertain future.
Pub closures have become a familiar story across England over the past decade. Thousands of pubs have shut their doors since 2010, hit by rising costs, changing drinking habits, and the long shadow cast by the pandemic. Community campaigners have fought to save hundreds of locals up and down the country, with some successes but many more losses.
The Jolly Fisherman in Barking became a symbol of that wider trend, but also of something more specific to urban England in the 2020s. The question of who gets to define community, and whose version of community gets prioritised, is one that plays out in towns and cities across the country every day.
Dinneen’s play does not pretend to resolve that question. What it does is ask audiences to sit with the complexity of it, to feel the grief of the regulars who lost their local while also recognising that the area around it did not stand still while the building sat empty.
For a Fringe show inspired by a fairly obscure news story about a pub in east London, The Jolly Fisherman has struck a nerve. It speaks to something that feels very current in England right now, that sense of places and identities shifting faster than people can keep up with, and the mix of loss and possibility that comes with that.
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