Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina to stage ‘Riot Days’ play at Edinburgh Fringe 2025

Pussy Riot‘s Maria Alyokhina is set to stage a play based on her 2017 memoir Riot Days at Edinburgh Fringe 2025.

• READ MORE: Who are Pussy Riot? A guide to the Russian activist group who crashed the World Cup Final

The co-founder of the feminist punk group published the book years after Pussy Riot dominated headlines for their protest gigs, which were often staged guerrilla-style.

Pussy Riot: Riot Days is “a story of resistance, repression and revolution in a mixture of concert, rally, theatre and political happening,” the festival stated in a press release, adding that the show has been revised to include topics like “the prosecution of political prisoners and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine”.

Alyokhina is currently touring the play in the US – the production features a live band that includes Alyokhina and fellow Pussy Riot members Diana Burkot, Olga Borisova, and Alina Petrova. Her performance at Edinburgh Fringe 2025 will span from August 12 to 23 – find tickets here and see the full line-up here.

Pussy Riot first gained notoriety for their 2012 protest piece, ‘A Punk Prayer’, which was a response to accusations of electoral fraud and rigging in Vladimir Putin’s re-election.

The protest resulted in the imprisonment of founding members Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova, though they were released early in light of an amnesty bill passed shortly before Russia’s hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Since then, they have staged multiple protests, including a performance at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, a pitch invasion during the 2018 World Cup Finals, and at the Indiana State Capitol, in response to the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The same year, they released their debut mixtape ‘Matriarchy Now’.

In 2023, they were awarded with the Woody Guthrie Prize. They have also teamed up with various artists over the last few years, including a single with Avenged Sevenfold, a collaboration with Novo Twins, and a whole mixtape executive produced by Tove Lo, which featured guest spots from Salem Ilese, Big Freedia, Hudson Mohawke and iLoveMakonnen.

A scripted television series about Pussy Riot was also announced in 2023 by Tolokonnikova, who expressed her ambition with the show to “inspire a new generation of rebels”.

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