All Reviews
46 ReviewsKathy
Cathy is a show about death and belonging, centred on a newly widowed woman and a family processing the death of their husband, father and grandfather in very different ways....
Playback
Playback follows teenager Euan Munro looking back through the history of his YouTube vlog as he is groomed online, turning vulnerability, abuse, anxiety and naivety into a raw Bildungsroman. The...
The Katet vs 1995
The Katet vs 1995 is a showcase for some of the strongest musicianship at the Fringe. The instrumentation is fantastic, and this is plainly a group of exceptionally talented players....
Water Colour
Water Colour brings together two lives shaped by pressure: a girl at art school struggling with her mental health and an aspiring chef working in a professional kitchen. Their lives...
After Party
After Party gathers an elderly actress and her family for one final party before she undergoes assisted dying, with the occasion opening up years of family trauma and rivalry. The...
Badgers
Badgers is a true-crime-style piece of gig theatre in which the search for a missing young man opens into a strange story of badgerism, magic, loss and the difficulty of...
Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life
Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life tells the story of Keith Alessi surviving cancer and finding meaning through playing the banjo. It is a warm story...
Churchill’s Urinal
Churchill’s Urinal imagines a new female Chancellor trying to remove the urinal once used by Winston Churchill from her private bathroom, with the resulting political chaos turned into a satire...
For Dolores
For Dolores is a two-hander about two women whose friendship becomes entangled with marriage, betrayal, murder, motherhood and class. One gets engaged and cheats with the other’s brother; the fiancé...
Supposing:
Supposing: follows a woman who falls down a hole and acquires the ability to see the future, with a Greek chorus delivering predictions around the growth of the far right...
The Singer
The Singer pairs a washed-up street performer with a talented deaf musician, building a friendship around music, equity, acceptance and the expectations of an ableist society. Jamie Rea’s Joe experiences...
Bog Witch
Bog Witch is a solo piece about anthropogenic climate change, moving from the city to the countryside in an attempt to fill what the protagonist calls the “hole in her...
Nesting
Nesting puts a father confronting motor neurone disease and assisted dying alongside a daughter going through IVF, with an absurdist anthropomorphic seagull appearing to embody the father’s anxieties. From there...
An Echo in the Void
An Echo in the Void is a Black Mirror-esque thriller in which four apparent strangers wake together inside a virtual reality after an AI system designed to help with grief...
Atomic Tales
Atomic Tales is a is a dramatic monologue about the Chernobyl disaster, told through the memories of Lyudmila, the wife of one of the firefighters sent to the plant. Performed...
Frames
Frames is an autobiographical musical journey from Jon Andrew Franklin, told through stories, original music and a loop pedal, tracing his life through Hawaii, Los Angeles and the Fringe, and...
Liberace and Liza – A Tribute
Liberace and Liza is a cabaret comedy duet imagining what might have happened if Liberace and Liza Minnelli had performed together, built around numbers associated with both. David Saffert plays...
Police Cops: The Original
Police Cops is a semi-improvised story of revenge: a murdered brother’s death sends another brother into the police in pursuit of retribution, amid police corruption, 80s music and a lot...
The Real Kyle McCarren
The Real Kyle McCarren is a brand new musical about the death of a twenty-one-year-old, told by his best friend and bandmate. The story is fragmented through time, with dead...
DIVAS: From Stage To Screen
DIVAS is a four-woman singing show built around female-written songs, ranging from Cher to Shirley Basset, with individual solos and a four-piece band providing solid backing. The singing is very...
Don’t You Forget About Me
Don’t You Forget About Me starts with a neatly exhibited sequence: David Shopland recreates The Breakfast Club, using stools to stand in for its five teenagers. It is a clever...
Flesh — Still Life
Flesh is a series of movement sketches about the body and the various ways of escaping it: a hospital death, plastic surgery, an immersive virtual-reality episode and a funeral. The...
Prophets
Prophets follows a geologist arriving on a remote Pacific island, where he encounters a religious cult and a man who appears to be a victim of abuse. The story develops...
Scaramouche Jones
On the Eve of a new millenium, a the hundred-year-old clown Scaramouche Jones looks spends the last hour of his life looking back over a journey that spans seas, continents,...
Silent Disco
Silent Disco is supposed to let the audience hear the characters’ thoughts through headphones, turning a relationship story into something part play, part stream of consciousness. Unfortunately, the headphones were...
The Last Drop
The Last Drop is a domestic, absurdist parlour drama in Portuguese with supertitles, somewhere between Pinter and Beckett, built around a crack in the ceiling of a flat about to...
Where We Choose to Stand
Where We Choose to Stand presents itself as a theatre-dance piece about climate activism, combining a solo dancer with a few verbatim excerpts and audience participation. In practice, there is...
ADDING UP AMERICA: Solving the Race Equation
Adding Up America is the personal account of Monique DeBose growing up Black/mixed race in America, using mathematics as a metaphor for the attempt to make sense of her own...
Depths of Wikipedia
In Depths of Wikipedia, viral social media experimenter Annie Rauwerda turns the oddities of Wikipedia into a lecture-style comedy show, drawing laughs from the strange things people have collectively decided...
flights for future generations
The show, flights for future generations tells the history of women aviators through objects, memories, fragments, and voiceover, turning the stage into a kind of analogue tapestry harking back...
To Do Lists
Most of our lives will be consumed by lists for just about everything. To Do Lists takes advantage of this familiar machinery in its Bildungsroman of a girl trying to...
ASURA: An Enlightenment Experiment
ASURA presents itself as an experiment in enlightenment, built around Wayne Stewart’s creation of an AI-powered enlightenment guru. In practice, it is mostly Stewart talking through his personal experiments and...
CRUSH
CRUSH puts two Somali teenagers together in a therapy waiting room and lets romance develop around them. It touches on Somali experience, politics and masculinity, but the material stays frustratingly...
Down in Colorado
Down in Colorado is a one-man, musical, beat-style biography, accompanied by light comedy and guitar playing. It has some interesting stories, and there is an appealing oddness to the mixture...
Ludwig: Unfinished Business
Ludwig is a one-man music-comedy biography of Beethoven, combining dramatic monologue, stand-up and piano. It is a nice idea, and there are some amusing quips and classical-music-nerd in-jokes, but the...
A Haunted House
A Haunted House is a comedy mime horror built around clowning, physical performance and audience interaction. Unfortunately, the miming is very poor, and the clowning is awkward. There is lots of...
Dracula: Lucy’s Dream
Dracula: Lucy’s Dream is a horror puppet shadow play that pushes itself far beyond conventional theatre into the realms of a sickly ballet where light itself becomes the principal actor....
Dribble
Dribble tells the story of Brazilians whose lives intersect through football and music, treating football as something that runs between people and lives, making them bearable and beautiful. It is...
Midsummer!
Midsummer! calls itself a reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it is really a slightly adapted, abridged and simplified version of the play. The rewriting does make it more...
The Pitch
The Pitch uses Gaelic football to explore the Irish divide, setting friendship across social and sexual boundaries against the shadow of a future United Ireland referendum. The strongest idea in...
27 Club
27 Club arrives as a live rockumentary about musicians who died at twenty-seven. The music is the clear strength: the musicians are talented, and when the band is playing well...
Fractured
Fractured is a court drama told in flashbacks, reconstructing a car accident from the sister’s perspective. The idea is good: the fractured structure gives the story a natural way to circle...
Goodbye Horses
Goodbye Horses is a one-man, "unofficial" retelling of The Silence of the Lambs, built around a deliberately twisted and comic treatment of familiar material. The production itself is better than...
Sh!t-faced Shakespeare®: Hamlet
Sh!t-faced Shakespeare: Hamlet is at heart Hamlet but with one major interruption: Hamlet's actor gets paralytically drunk before the audience have taken their seats. The premise is deliberately silly, and...
The Late Utopians
The Late Utopians is a dramatic monologue in which a journalist investigates underground rave culture and romance against the backdrop of an unraveling America. The political class issues are interesting,...
Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie
Woody Sez is a four-piece musical biography of Woody Guthrie, with the storytelling and music woven together to tell a complex and winding life. The musicians do not simply accompany...
