Mixing Nostalgia and Wit: Nathan Jonathan set to take Edinburgh Fringe by Storm with 'A Small Town Northern Tale'

Northern Wind Theatre Company presents A Small Town Northern Tale, a semi-autobiographical solo comedy by Nathan Jonathan. The show explores the experiences of growing up mixed-race in a small Northern town in early 2000s England, blending nostalgia, humour, and poignant reflections on race, class, and identity. Nathan Jonathan performs all the characters himself in this vibrant storytelling piece directed by David O’Mahony.

We spoke to Nathan Jonathan who is a Northern-born, London-based writer and performer ahead of his Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut with this show.

What inspired you to write A Small Town Northern Tale?

A couple of years ago, I was rewatching A Bronx Tale (a classic coming-of-age story, highly recommended if you haven't seen it!) and I thought to myself, where’s the version of this that speaks to me? Y2K. Working-class. Northern. Mixed-race. I didn’t see that story growing up — so I wrote it - about my own, rather turbulent, upbringing.

I wanted to capture what it was like being the only kid who looked like me in a small town, during an era we now remember with rose-tinted glasses. I wanted to peel back the gloss of Y2K nostalgia and talk about race, domestic violence, masculinity, and growing up where you don’t quite fit. 

It started with that idea and it turned into nearly 2 years of writing, rewriting, preview shows… and now, here we are at the biggest arts festival in the world with Underbelly! 

You perform all the characters yourself — how do you switch between them on stage?

I treat it a bit like play. It’s all in the rhythm, the energy. Some characters live higher in the voice, others have weight in the body for example.  

The show’s written with sharp transitions in lighting and sound, so I lean into that — using posture, pace, and just trusting the audience will come along with me. Once we’re in that moment together, performer and audience, it feels a bit like dancing. Sometimes you’re falling, sometimes you're back up and flying.

What’s your favourite Y2K cultural reference that features in the show?

I’ve got such an overwhelming fondness for the early days of the internet — especially MSN Messenger — so it was really important to me to weave that into the show.

There’s something kind of magic about remembering what it felt like to talk to people online for the very first time. That teenage thrill of a “hey u k?” pinging in the corner of the screen, or getting hit with a ‘nudge’ that shook your entire desktop.

A close second (though for VERY different reasons) is the section about lads mags. Absolute relics now. It still blows my mind how normalised they were. Whole shelves filled with half-naked women — and more often than not, teenage girls — plastered alongside horrendous jokes about “fit birds” and “proper banter.”

It was all shrugged off as harmless fun at the time… but looking back, it’s mental. Absolutely mental. In the show, I put a lens on it: not just to critique it, but to ask what it taught an entire generation of boys about women, gender, sex, and about themselves.

How do you balance the humour with the more serious themes like domestic abuse and racial identity?

It was really important to me that the audience could inhabit the world of the play — a small, working-class Northern town in the Y2K era, in doing that - I want to take the audience back to that feeling of being a teenager with not a coherent thought between your ears, but trying to make sense of your world. 

But my writing makes it clear: the jokes are never about the heavy stuff — they’re about the world around it. Comedy’s a coping mechanism. Especially when you grow up somewhere tough.

So, the show invites you to laugh with the character… then hits you with a moment that reminds you what he’s carrying underneath.

That’s life, innit? Joy and pain, side by side. Just don’t let either drown you.

If you could give one piece of advice to young people feeling like they don’t fit in, what would it be?

Don’t shrink to fit the mould - you might just be in a place that doesn't know what to do with you so you cant flourish yet. It took me years to realise that. It’s not that not-fitting-in is a failure, it’s a freedom. In short, every single day you wake up is a day you get to rewrite the rules. All of your weird little quirks — I promise they’ll be your super power one day.

If you could time travel back to the early 2000s, what’s one thing from that era you’d bring back?

CDs, Mixtapes and LimeWire. Spotify has spoiled me - I can never decide what to listen to!

I’d bring back that absolute chaos of early music piracy (don’t sue me, please Sony).

Picture this Gen Z: you’ve spent four hours on your dial-up modem downloading what you think is Linkin Park’s In the End.mp3. Your ma’s fuming ‘cos she hasn’t been able to use the landline all day. You’re buzzing…. Only to realise you’ve actually downloaded a distorted Crazy Frog clip with Soulja Boy shouting “YOUUU!” over the top.

Peak internet. Better run that virus scan. 

And burning CDs too! That was good weren't it? You’d carefully drag songs into Windows Media Player, wait for your PC to wheeze through the process, then scrawl “Summa Bangers ‘04 xox” on the front with a sharpie.

Art.

A Small Town Northern Tale is at Iron Belly at Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61), 31 July – 24 August (not 11 August), 12.40 – 13.40. For tickets, go to https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/a-small-town-northern-tale