Edinburgh Fringe 2026

August 26, 2026August 27, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Man Sings the Same Song Over and Over Again for an Hour by Conk and Quiet Riot – Summerhall

He does, and it’s a very clever idea, conceptually simple but completely fascinating. Australian comedian Conk (Connor Dariol) hits on something special which is hard to described without identifying the song, which would spoil the surprise when the audience first recognises the introduction. It would be safe to say that everyone’s reaction is ‘whaaat?’ Not only has Conk chosen to repeat himself for an hour, he’s chosen a song that many people would avoid listening to just once. But the choice is part of the show’s purpose. As he repeatedly performs the song (15 times) his style changes from a fully energised crowd-pumping hand gesturing performance to something more doubtful. As we hear the dated, sexist and somewhat disturbing lyrics again and again, we are forced to think about what they mean, and what kind of a culture, a generation ago, was producing this material. It’s funny but completely compelling as a show because it isn’t really comedy. An hour with Conk is closer to conceptual art – specifically Ragnar Kartjansson’s A Lot of Sorrow, a film in which The National perform their song ‘Sorrow’ live again and again – than to any stand-up show you might see at the Fringe.

Foriegner by Koan Brothers (Sohrab Haghverdi, Benjamin and Mason Rosenthal) – Summerhall

Foriegner (sic) is an exceptional performance from Sohrab Haghverdi which uses all the power of live performance to get confrontation with his captive audience. He does not feel the need to win us over, as is evident from the first scene of the show, which is simply him coughing over and over for what feels like 10 minutes. He then goes on to crawl around wearing a rug, to talk endlessly about ejaculation and urine, and to excoriate a long list of religions and ethnicities including his two Jewish directors. He intersperse film clips of Summerhall Arts CEO Sam Gough, talking in arts world platitudes. And, yes, he does produce and then drink his own urine on stage. The rationale for such an unpredictable and off-putting performance is political. Sohrab is Iranian, trying to escape from the Iranian regime, which he hates, and settle permanently in the US, which he’s not particularly keen on either. He has no wish to tell the refuguees story we expect, and has decided that doing ‘crazy’ things on stage is the only way he can get a visa, through the exceptions offered to ‘genius’ artists’. A scene in which he plays a sperm quoting the philosopher Rumi, who tells us to kill our false selves to live honestly, is brilliantly weird, and a neat summary of Sohrab’s intentions. Foriegner is a startling and original piece of theatre, much more sophisiticated than it would have us believe.

Toast by Jude Green – Summerhall

Jude Green’s show is based on her own experiences of navigating the Universal Credit system to keep her head above water while trying to maintain a career as an actor. It is rather too close to the nose, I imagine, for many Fringe performers, depicting as it does in excruciating but almost comic detail the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that comes as a mandatory accompaniment to a benefits claim. Green, who claims not to know what Kafkaesque means, plays a helpless character, alone on stage responding to the disembodied voice of the Universal Credit helpline, which also becomes the voice of her equally high-handed agent – played from the gallery by Jack Whateley, also the show’s tech operator. The cycle of jobs that pay nothing or cost her money to take, and general hostility to a sustainable career in theatre becomes increasingly absurd, eventually absorbing the very show we are watching, but the message is loud, clear and important. Who can afford to work in theatre any more?

Celtic Collective by Dance and National Youth Arts Wales – Dancebase

Two pieces performed by the National Youth Dance Companies of Wales and Scotland. The Welsh dancers perform Momentum, moving around large mirrors to music by composers from James Blake to Tchaikovsky, which keeps the action somewhat static until they break free late in the piece and the energy starts to flow. The Scottish dancers, performing Afterglow are a larger company and perform in 1920s party costumes in orange, gold and black, with more than hint of David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video. They move freely and energetically, impressing with the quality and confidence of their dancing as they appear in changing combinations, crossing and recrossing the stage. An impressive and enjoyable hour of emerging work.

Werewolf by Binge Culture – Summerhall

New Zealand company Binge Culture’s Werewolf is a shaggy dog show, which is silly but entertaining. The audience is confined to the auditorium for five days and nights as part of a national effort to contain an outbreak of lycanthropy. Things start cheery, with breathing exercises and health checks, but the three safe house supervisors become suspicious of one another, and increasing scary things start happening a night, with the house lights off. Members of the audience are given roles which they are not allowed to reveal, so things gets very unexpected and it’s fair to say it doesn’t end very well. It’s an exercise in how much you can wind up an audience in the space of an hour, but it turns out more funny rather than frightening.

EXIT by Circumstances – Zoo Southside

Circumstances are four Belgian circus and dance performers, in a show choreographed by Piet Van Dycke. Their set begins as a set of doors, and they move through them in increasingly complicated patterns, emerging in different costumes and from unexpected directions. The backdrop is white, which makes them look like a human cartoon – specifically like a Morph animation by Tony Hart, with their slightly exaggerated movement giving the impression of characters who are not entirely human. So far, so enjoyable, but the show steadily increases the pace and the stakes, when the central section of the set, 15 feet high, starts to revolve around a central axis, reversing the position of the door then, eventually, spinning wildly. All the while the performers move up, through, around and over it, risking decapitation several times a minute. Their movements are daring bordering on the ill-advised, but coordinated to an incredible degree of precision. It is entirely mesmerising, and the piece gains an irresistible momentum, bringing the audience with it until we reach the end, barely believing what we have seen. It is a tour de force.

Badgers by Malaika Kegode – Traverse Theatre

Badgers is written and performed by Malaike Kegode, with backing from a two-person band who perform in a booth behind her – Beth Roberts and Joe Williams. The story she tells is about a folk musician who disappeared ten years ago while recording an album, and may have stumbled on a song with supernatural powers. Unfortunately, this is not a convincing premise. The story seems wilfully whimsical, a characteristic of the worst folk music, and lacking in wider resonance. The characters are highly dislikeable, especially Kegode’s, a podcaster called Meles Costas who combines naïvety with a complete lack of moral principle. She seems to represent a sature of the content-producing era, but we also seem to be expected to engage with and follow her. Kegode’s performance is underpowered – she is miked up in the Traverse’s small studio space which actually makes her harder to hear – and the writing is not of the quality for which the Traverse is justly known.

Soft Spot by Olo Company and Cluster Arts – Zoo Southside

A Swedish piece, Soft Spot is performed by Stina Otterström and Arttu Lahtinen. She is a handstand artist, and he is a juggler. They show their skills through the use of a lot of wine glasses in ways that make the audience hold their breath, partly in terror and partly in disbelief. Lahtinen does not juggle in the traditional sense – he moves, manipulates, spins and stacks wine glasses in ways that are highly precarious. He also arranges them so Otterström can perform handstands on them, upturned, in groups at first and then in smaller and smaller numbers. Eventually they bring on a box ostensibly filled with their breakages and tip a mountain of broken glass over the stage. The barefoot Otterström sweeps a path through the shards, which are all too visible in the stage lighting, and stands on her hands on glasses in the centre of the chaos. The underlying them of the show is trust and interdependence: the two work closely together and everything, including their safety, depends on the other getting it right. It’s ridiculously impressive – hard to classify, but certainly unlike anything else on offer at the world’s largest festival, which is an achievement in itself.

Gameplay by Carmen Collective – Pleasance Dome

Carmen Collective are performer Sam Rees, musician AJ Turner and producer Ella Dale. Gameplay is a show in which very little happens, but a great deal is described. Rees stands behind a lectern and tells the audience what they are seeing, which is him and AJ Turner, behind a laptop. It is as though he is describing the scene for audience members without sight, before the actual show begins – and this is partially true. The show is designed as an accessible performance, but the descriptive style becomes the show itself, as Turner builds a slow burning electronic soundtrack in the background. Rees tells us about Vasili Arkhipov, an executive officer on the Soviet B-59 submarine, which was off the coast of Cuba in 1962. He is credited with refusing, under enormous pressure, to fire a nuclear torpedo at the USS Randolph, an aircraft carrier it believed was depth-charging them. In doing so, he almost certainly prevented nuclear apocalypse. This story is one of the most consequential in human history (although Arkhipov is, terrifyingly, not the only Soviet individual to have single-handedly prevented nuclear war), and Rees’ matter-of-fact narration builds an unforgettable picture. His detached explanation of the sequence of events that would have ended humanity is reminiscent of Ontrorend Goed’s masterful World Without Us, in which it gradually dawns on the audience that the narrator is describing a world without humanity – a comparison that reflects the clarity and ambition of Carmen Collective’s work. The Arkhipov story is intertwined with a strange, melancholy story from the point of view of notoriously reactionary Daily Mail theatre critic Quentin Letts, attending the theatre and finding himself disconnected and disappointed by everything. In some ways, it seems the show was devised to meet the brief of dropping a nuclear bomb on Quentin Letts, which makes it funny as well as formally daring.

Supposing by Zinnie Harris – Traverse Theatre

Zinnie Harris’ new play, which she also directs, is about the experiences of a woman who thinks she has been cursed. Sally (Nicole Cooper) falls down a hole in the pavement while going about her everyday business, and afterwards finds herself beset by a Greek chorus who insist, sometimes physically, that she behaves in a way that fits their perceptions of how a Greek drama should be structured. Meanwhile, she gains a Cassandra-like ability to foresee future disasters, and naturally no-one will listen to her. Richard Conlon, as her husband, does his best to be sympathetic, even agreeing to tell the neighbour who hates them that Sally has foreseen she has cancer, but he draws the line at scouring the city for an unidentified young refugee woman who may be about to lose her baby. Performed on a bare set with only a white chalk circle (designer Alisa Kalyanova), the cast are excellent at bringing Harris’ funny but strangely believable writing to life. Cooper is thoroughly likeable, and makes others feel bad for doubting her. But is it all in her head? The truth of what is happening is not really the point – it is ultimately a play about the strains on a marriage, filtered through the extremities of the classics. It is also a play about our times, with the far right and the refugee crisis floating around the margins of the narrative, expertly handled and never overstated. Supposing is an intensely imagined drama which shows us our own concerns through a lens that makes them seem wilder, stranger and more urgent.

How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show) by Salty Brine – Summerhall

Salty Brine’s 2024 Edinburgh run in ‘These Are the Contents of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show)‘ was a triumph, and has allowed him to scale up (at least in terms of the experimental theatre hiearchy) to a booking in the flagship Disseection Room at Summerhall for his new show. It’s no more than he deserves. Salty combines a book and an album to create cabaret-esque performances that are uniquely his. After Annie Lennox and Kate Chopin in 2024, ‘How Strange It Is’ brings together Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Anne Frank’s diary. The concept sounds bizarre: the reality is absolutely top notch theatre-making. Neutral Milk Hotel’s guiding spirit is Jeff Mangum, a somewhat enigmatic character who incorporated his fascination with Anne Frank’s writing into a record which has gained a cult follow. Salty somewhat overstates Mangum’s reclusiveness and reluctance to talk about the album – I well remember him curating and headlining a 2012 edition of All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2012 – but the album is gorgeous and it’s succession of irresistible tunes conceals multiple levels of meaning. Against this, Salty winds together his reading of Anne Frank’s coming of age with Peter van Pels, a story that shines out far beyond its tragic context, and his own awakening as a gay man. No-one but Salty could pull this off, delivering a full, astonishly dynamic performance of the album with a backing band while weaving a wider story out of the music. He’s done it before, but it keeps getting better. There is absolutely nothing to dislike about this show, which leaves everyone lucky enough to see it elated.

QFWFQ by Gregory Nussen – Summerhall

Gregory Nussen’s one-man show has its roots in Jorge Luis Borges. Named after the narrator in Borges’ Cosmicomics, the performance starts with Nussen’s plan to write a show based his book If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, which is famously a novel about the novel itself and the experience of reading it, rather than any conventional subject. Although he frames the show with lots of self-reflexive material, including interventions from audience members secretly given scripts who claim to be assigned by ‘The Institute’ to inspect his storytelling, it gradually reveals itself to be personal. A story emerges, which becomes increasingly alarming, about his Jewish US upbringing, the messages he was fed, and what happens if you challenge the conventional narrative about the legitimacy of Israel and its actions. What Nussen himself describes as a failed exercise in experimental performance morphs into a powerful exploration of one of the most prominent political issues of our time. Nussen’s charm and self-deprecation work very well to set up a show that tells a story no-one wants to hear – a definition of theatre that matters.

Border Bodies by TF Ciade Dança – Dancebase

Sāo Paolo dance company TF Ciade Dança perform a work choreographed by Igor Gasparini, which dials up the energy from zero to something way past eleven over the course of an hour. The eight dancers, a mix of genders, ethnic backgrounds and body types, begin with barely perceptible movements as though they are trying to escape shackles. Then they explode into life, to a soundtrack of pulsing beats, moving as group, writhing into stylised, fluid poses while lit like a Caravaggio picture. They are mesmerising as they put their all into a technically very precise sequence in which they constantly move around one another, before finally breaking out into individual sequences, dancing as though they are at club. It’s an exhilarating experience.

Mother, Maiden and Crone by Ewan Burns – Bedlam Theatre

I doubt that anyone except the performers and the group of their delighted friends in the audience understood what was going on during Mother, Maiden and Crone, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a good time. The Bedlam Theatre is a last bastion of the old Fringe, before it became significantly more corporatised. The walls of the bar are plastered with Fringe posters going back half a century, and the atmosphere is one of unbridled, unfunded experimentation. It feels essential to the spirit of the festival, and stills draws good audiences and wins awards. Mother, Maiden and Crone is effectively a queer pantomine, about three queens running a club dealing with the horror of hosting a hen night. Parallels with Macbeth are extremely loosed, although it does give a great excuse to kill characters. The performers don’t need the Festival for their show: you get the impression they’d be here anyway, with most of their audiences, trading in extensive in-jokes and scene motifs, essentially playing themselves and not worrying too much about the lines. There’s more corpsing than I’ve seen on stage for years, and it feels like two fingers up to the worst inclinations of the Fringe, which come closer to a hen party than is generally admitted. A show that sits outside star ratings and conventional expectations is, in many ways, something special.

Julius Caesar Variety Show by Joy Nesbitt – Summerhall

Joy Nesbitt’s play, set in an audition for a production of Julius Caesar, is a satire on the cult of the director, and on people who play lip-service to diversity. It is also set in Dublin during far-right riots resembling those that took place in 2023. As the threat builds outside, the three performers feel threatened in different ways, especially Black actor played by Loré Adewusi. Meanwhile, the preening and tyrannical director (Ultan Pringle) is an obnoxious bully, constantly clamning that the actors must trust his ‘process’. The scenario is promising, but under delivers, principally because the characters are too extreme to feel real, and too annoying to make us care, while there is not enough comedy to drive the play as a satire. The director character is a larger-than-life monster, while interactions between Adwewusi and the gaffe-prone Daniel Mahon seem contrived. Pattie Maguire, as the only woman in the room, plays a character who never seems to settle. The connection to the riots is never fully explored or developed either, beyond the somewhat vague suggestion of parallels with the play. A bloody ending that comes out of almost nowhere, while amusing, feels like something of a cop-out.

Tell Me by Sadiq Ali Company – Summerhall

The Edinburgh-based Sadiq Ali Company are circus performers, and Tell Me is an inventive and powerful piece of work. It deals with two diagnoses of HIV, for a man in the 1980s and a woman in 2026, and traces the very different options and trajectories, showing how far we have come in being to prevent a disease which killed so many a generation ago. The purpose of the show it to highlight the threats to this progress from far right politics and funding cuts. The narrative is delivered through a selective voice over, but the medium of expression is the three performers’ remarkable skills. They perform on a metal frame, two metal cubes suspended within it. Their feats of flexibility and strength escalate, to the audience’s astonishment, as they pull off moves that are more and more risky and unlikely. It’s not just a display of skills though – the choreography is coherent and highly expressive, and the show is moving and complete.

Collaborator by Ockham’s Razor – Pleasance at Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Ockham’s Razor are led by circus performers Charlotte Mooney and Alex Harvey, who met at circus school twenty years ago, married and started performing together against their best instincts. They went on to build a company and fascinating CVs, but it’s been a while since they performed as a couple. Now 47, they do it one final time, devising a show which is just the two of them, and expresses the trust and tensions of marriage and interdependence. Collaborator is genuine and moving, and a huge physical achievement. Much of the show is performed inside an open, metal box suspended 20 feet above the stage. Even hanging from this height would be too much for most of us, but it’s their resting position as they prepare for fluid sequences of intertwined moves, as they raise, support, lean and lie on one another, all in mid-air. It’s mesmerising to watch, and the couple’s charm is unmistakable, down to Charlotte’s need to find her glasses every time she talks to the audience. The show has several segments, including sequences using pendulums and digressions on wave theory, some of which work better than others. However, at its best – when they are showcasing their circus skills – Charlotte and Alex own the stage one final time.

Bits of In Bed With My Brother – Shedinburgh at Zoo Checkpoint

In Bed With My Brother broke through with their exceptional, unpredictable show Philosophy of the World at the 2025 Fringe. For one night only they reprised highlights of their previous career, which goes back to 2016 when they got together in Exeter. Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory claim to have performed this succession of very silly and highly entertaining sketches before, but it is quite possible they were making all this up. They also open the show by describing them as ‘shit’ and, having lowered expectations, are to do precisely as they please for the rest of the evening – a very freeing strategy. This includes a whole series of throwaway non-sketches including Soup and a Towel, which is like Vic and Bob with more nudity, and a game of Guess Who? in which they ‘flip’ members of the audiences. Kat takes all her clothes off and pretends to heat up a vindaloo in a microwave. They show a dance they claim never to have got right and eventually, invite a trio of pre-briefed young men up on stage, who do it perfectly. Then they have to finish because the stage manager says they’re 10 minutes over. Everyone in the room enjoys every minute of a show that illustrates what is possible with the confidence to be as silly as you can possibly be on stage.

Cleansed

July 31, 2026July 31, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Pearl Chandra and Leo Bill. Photo by Marc Brenner.

Cleansed by Sarah Kane – Almeida Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Director Rebecca Frecknall signs off her highly successful time as Associate at the Almeida Theatre with a statement production of perhaps the most feared play of modern times. This is true of both the events in Cleansed, which are unremittingly brutal, and of the challenges it presents to anyone attemping a production. Frecknall has said that every page of the play contains something that seems unstageable, and Sarah Kane uses the play to push the boundaries of theatre in many different ways. It’s not a surprise then that Cleansed is seen only sporadically, with the last major production ten years ago at the National Theatre. But the challenges it presents – to production team, cast and audience – are what make it such a remarkable work, which grows in stature as the furore around Kane fades, and we can see it with the perspective granted by a different era.

Kane sets the play in a future university which has become some kind of re-education facility, but Frecknall places it in an institution that looks more like a hospital. This makes sense, as the re-education techniques applied by overseer Tinker (Leo Bill) are violently medical in nature. We meet some of the male inmates. Robin (Stuart Thompson) and Rod (Parth Thakerar) begin a relationship, although Rod is cynical about anything except the ‘now’. Graham (Jack Riddiford) begs drugs from Tinker, who injects him in the eyeball with an overdose which kills him. It is clear from the opening moments what Kane will be giving us.

Later, Grace (Pearl Chandra) arrives, looking for her dead brother’s clothes. They appear to have had an incestous relationship, and the resurrected Graham remains on stage with her throughout. She swaps clothes with vulnerable loner Carl (Luke Cinque-White), who is happier in her dress. The relationships Kane writes about are all unconventional – queer and trans – and this is what Tinker punishes again and again, with increasingly Gothic acts of abuse and violence. These acts of mutilation are part of what makes Cleansed so difficult to stage. Frecknall addresses this neatly with the brutal binding of hands and feet, which then are dipped in a bucket of blood, and the inventive use of blood bags and bloodied rags. They also make it difficult to watch, but Kane is simply reflecting back to the audience the violence that takes place daily across the world against queer people. She does so in an established theatrical language which clearly references Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. Acts reflecting Edward II and Titus Andronicus, for example, make the brutality familiar, if no less awful.

However, despite its intentionally relentless assault on the audience’s senses Cleansed is, oddly, a funny play too and most importantly a play about love. Kane’s writing is honed to the absolute minimum, saying exactly what she needs to and no more. A line such as Tinker’s “I may be a cunt, but I’m not a twat” lands with the absolute clarity of classic writing. Similarly, when Rod says “There’s only now. There’s never been anything else”, we hear someone cutting clean through the muddiness of existence.

Frecknall works with set designer Madeleine Girling and costume designer Debbie Duru to create an institution with all the dinginess of the worst hospital, and clothing that is familiar yet odd. Girling then pulls off a reveal that makes the audience gasp when it rolls back to reveal a vast field of daffodils. The use of music in the production is also very distinctive. Composer Angus MacRae’s repetitive industrial rumbles and cello notes set a tone of constant unease. Two further pieces – ‘Days’ by The Kinks and the ‘Allegro Maestoso’ from Handel’s ‘Water Music’ are brilliantly used as a backdrop for both joy and violence. Frecknall uses dance to express what cannot be put into words, often as transition between scenes, and the cast’s movement is very effective.

The cast approach their challenging roles with full commitment. Luke Cinque-White is edgy but likeable which makes the play’s grimmest scene, which I will not describe, all the more terrible to watch as it involves him. Pearl Chandra drives the play as the central female character, targeted and exposed but changing the men around her. Leo Bill tortures his charges like a bored plumber, in work jacket and glasses. Stuart Thompson and Parth Thakerar play out a heartbreaking real relationship amid the gore. Jack Riddiford is the spectre at the bloody banquet. The play ends with a strange, almost happy ending as Bill is emotionally disarmed by Lizzy Connolly’s erotic dancer who he has been manipulating. Cleansed remains a revelatory work. Nearly 30 years after its première there is still nothing like it, and is now, surely, recognised as a European classic.

Archduke

July 29, 2026July 29, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Stanley Morgan, Marc Wootton, Chris Walley. Photo by Helen Murray.

Archduke by Rajiv Joseph – Royal Court Theatre, London

Rajiv Joseph’s new play takes a moment that everyone knows, or thinks they do, and uses absurdist comedy to tease it apart. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip is widely understood as the trigger for the First World War. But the reasons it happened are obscured by subsequent events, and the actual events not particularly well know. In fact, they lend themselves to farce, which Joseph uses as an entry point into the minds of three young, desperate men. As well as Princip (Stanley Morgan), there is Nedeljko (Chris Walley) – both starving, tubercular, naïve and open to pretty much anything. Their meeting in a cave, where they have been summoned by a recruiter called Trifco (Abraham Popoola, although he was sick the night I saw the play and his part was impressively read by a member of the backstage team) is highly Beckettian – two men adrift in the world, with little understanding of what they are doing there. Joseph’s writing is funny and sharp, mixing surreal comedy with dark realism. Princip and Nedeljko are horrified to find they are ‘lungers’ – i.e. that they have TB – and still more so to discover that it kills you. Morgan and Walley put in excellent, wired performances.

The play becomes steadily stranger and, at times, hilarious, as the two would-be assassins meet their recruiter, a Slav nationalist called Dragutin, played in a entertainingly over-the-top manner by Marc Wootton. Dragutin is a a deranged fantasist, and a real-life Serb paramilitary who had previously massacred the Serb royal family before commissioned the murders and triggered global disaster. His housekeeper, Sladjana is played by Janice Connolly, who is both very funny in her obsession with food, shared by the starving young men, and her unexpected tenderness as she attempts to save them from their fates. Es Devlin’s dramatic set features a train carriage and a giant cake, as well as the final open-topped car in which the characters play out the killings, forseeing what will happen.

Lyndsey Turner’s direction balances the play’s tone very well, bringing the absurdity of world-shaping events to life. The assassination was almost accidental. The planned attempt had wounded those in the car behind, but Franz Joseph’s car happened to stop outside the car where Princip was consoling himself, on its way to visit the injured. Joseph (Rajiv, rather than Franz) emphasises the unlikely nature of the events that led a group of inconsequential nobodies to have such a terrible effect on so many, while also suggesting it would probably have happened anyway sooner or later. The idea that the First World War was caused indirectly by poverty and disease as much as anything else, is a valuable historical perspective, and Archduke is a smart, thoroughly enjoyable piece of theatre.

The Oresteia

July 17, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

The Oresteia by Aeschylus, adapted by Simon Stone – Bridge Theatre, London

Simon Stone’s version of The Oresteia, transposed to commuter belt Kent, is a cousin to his National Theatre production of Phaedra – or, in the context of this particular drama, perhaps a sibling. Working with set designer Lizzie Clachan, he directs his own loose adaptation of Aeschylus, similarly staged inside a house with glass walls, among the wealthy upper classes. As with Phaedra, he delivers a production defined by complete, unapologetic confidence that the three part unravelling of Agamemon and his family can stripped of all the trapping that we think identify the story and still communicate essential human truth.

Stone dismantles the three parts of the Oresteia to tell much of the story in sequences of flashbacks, the timelines projected above his revolving set. We shamelessly spy on the activities, contained for the most part in the various rooms of an immaculate, expensive house somewhere outside Sevenoaks. A family – parents Christopher (David Morrissey) and Montie (Mary-Louise Parker), children Augie (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Alice (Rosie Sheehy), friends Jerome (John Macmillan) and his son Lorenzo (Archie Madueke) prepare for a birthday party. It’s Alice and her absent twin Isabel’s 21st, but family dynamics are extremely tense. Isabel isn’t coming because she’s fallen out with her father over his firm’s role in supplying military equipment, intentionally or otherwise, to Russia. Christopher’s older brother Melville (Lloyd Hutchinson) arrives, Mafia-don style, to lay down the way he wants it to play out. We know it isn’t going to end well

Stone plays an entertaining game with Aeschylus’ original, tackling story elements that don’t concern his version with insousiance. Melville, a Menelaus-figure, has a wife who had an affair which caused him to ram the gates of her lover’s house with his Range Rover and take a shit on his front steps – the Trojan War, in other words. However, his real focus is on Christopher’s betrayal of Isabel, exposing her mental health problems on national television, leading to her subsequent death by her own hand. The family relationships are thoroughly absorbing, delivered through a series of high quality performances by a fine cast. Rosie Sheehy as Alice, with an overwhelming inferiority complex, and Tom Glynn-Carney as her casual brother ignited to mete out brutal, self-righteous, have a fully believable sibling relationship which establishes a real domestic setting for the staggering violence which defines the play. David Morrissey is anguished and contrite in way that makes you want to… well… murder him. Mary-Louise Parker, in a rare appearance on the British stage, is a woman under impossible family pressure who is capable of being many different things, from loving mother to angel of death. Lloyd Hutchinson is thoroughly nasty, and father-son pair of John Macmillan and Archie Madueke have a deeply uncomfortable relationship based on neediness and rejection.

A long play feels short as the action unspools with a stomach-lurching relentlessness. The scene in which Christopher visits his now-ex wife Montie for dinner with her new partner Jerome, in the company of his new girlfriend Chandra (Rakhee Thakar) is horribly tense. Their housekeeper Jenny – Alyth Ross, channelling a cameo that reveals worlds about working for the super-rich – is drawn into the slaughter that approaches slowly and relentlessly. The transposition isn’t perfect – occasionally there are plot devices that might be more at home in a mid-range tv thriller – but it’s a thrilling and enthralling ride. No-one quite tackles the classics like Stone, and his productions make a significant amount of contemporary British theatre seems clumsy and mired in the past. A little bit of the Berlin Schaubühne does wonders in helping us look beyond our narrow shores.

Are You Watching?

June 10, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Kosar Ali and Abby McCann. Photo by Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Are You Watching? by Georgie Dettmer – Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London

The most disturbing aspect of Georgie Dettmer’s play about internet horror, at the top of a long list, are the two teenage girls. Kosar Ali and Abby McCann watch in their pyjamas from their bunk beds, as the full capacity of online culture to sexualise society and victimise women plays out for their entertainment. It does so with the audience lined up facing one another, either side of Georgia Wilmot’s white-tiled swimming pool style stage, with its unsettling, clinical, wipe-clean implications.

Dettmer’s debut play is a cry of rage, which lives on in the minds of viewers after the curtain, not least because it is about the consequences of watching. Scenes play out as a series of unconnected but thematically linked vignettes, viewed by the two girls. Nothing protects them from seeing whatever they choose on their screens and, as they discuss the worst things they’ve ever watched, the darkness of the material they are exposed to becomes all too clear. The play is clearly inspired by real-life events. There is a Giselle Pelicot story about a women drugged by her husband, raped by his friends and filmed. A Hollywood actress has nude images grimly manipulated on the internet, as her fury with the tech bosses whose platforms host the material builds. A father makes child abuse AI videos of his son. A woman takes part in research monitoring her reactions to increasingly extreme material. A young man wins a competition to sleep with an actress. The police manipulate a mother whose daughter is missing, to get the same level of attention they did for Madeleine McCann.

The deluge of dark scenarios assaults our senses and challenges our understanding of the world we live in, powered by Jess Edwards’ sharp direction, a shutter sound clanging each scene to a close. Performances are excellent, including Nicholas Rowe as an authority figure legitimising exploitation, Lucy McCormick, barely able to hide her desperation, and Maimuna Memon and Billy Bolt as, among other characters, a couple filming one another having sex.

Dettmer’s anger is clear, and it gives the play a fierce energy. The vignette structure that provides this energy also muddies the wider message to some extent. The overall theme is to be that by acting as voyeurs we are enabling and creating abuse of women in lots of different ways, and that we dehumanise ourselves and others by imagining our lives as sexual content. However, the audience is left in some doubt about how every element of the play contributes to the play’s thesis. Nevertheless, it is an urgent piece of writing, a significant achievement for a first time writer, and the kind of work that made the Royal Court famous. If Caryl Churchill and Edward Bond got together, they might produce something rather like this.

The P Word

June 3, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Waleed Akhtar and Esh Alladi. Photo by Craig Fuller

The P Word by Waleed Akhtar – Bush Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Waleed Akhtar’s two-hander, The P Word, returns to the Bush Theatre amid high expectations. Its first run resulted in the 2023 Olivier Award for Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre, placing author and performer Waleed Akhtar in some stellar company as one of four wins in a row for the Bush, including Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer. The production, by original director Anthony Simpson-Pike is more than capable of rising to the occasion, although it is salutary that a play about the mistreatment of gay men remains so current.

The P Word concerns two characters, Bilal or Billy, as he prefers to be known, played by Waleed Akhtar, and Zofar, played by Esh Alladi. Billy is a young, gay British Pakistani man struggling with his ethnic identity. Cycling through constant hook-ups, he starts to want the stable relationship he’s never found, while distancing himself from his family, who tolerate him only if he does not discuss the fact he is gay. Meanwhile, Zofar is stuck in an asylum holding pattern in grim accommodation in Hounslow. He fled Pakistan after his father had his lover murdered and threatened to kill him, when he discovered his son’s sexuality.

The play builds slowly. The two characters circle one another without meeting for a significant portion of the evening. A clever set, a raised, split revolve designed by Max Johns, facilitates this and later providing a series of places for the pair to sit and meet when they finally connect. Both actors give engaging performances. Akhtar is good at convincnig others than he is just in it for the sex and the good times, but becomes increasingly less good at convincing himself. He lashes out against Pakistanis – using the ‘p’ word of the title – and Muslims, but he is also funny and charming. It takes Alladi’s wiser but more damaged Zofar to let him see the value of his identity and the absurdity of his cultural assumptions. Alladi’s performance is full of character, enthusiasm and very believable desperation.

There is little doubt from the very start that the pair will get together, but it takes longer than it should for it to happen. However, once it does the play really comes alive, and delivers a series of increasingly moving encounters as the pair find out who they really are, and what they will risk to protect one another. From here on in, the audience is fully behind the couple as they experience the brutality of UK immigration, the random homophobia and random kindness of London, and the difficulty of being safe if you are gay, and especially if you are also from South Asia. Akhtar’s play is a powerful statement, highlighting experiences that are little known, and delivering a strong campaigning message about the cruel deportation of queer people from the UK, often to face death. It is an emotionally stretching, intellectually engaging evening which leaves you feeling you’ve experienced much more than a play.

A Quartet in Autumn

June 1, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Kate Duchêne and Paul Rider. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

A Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym, adapted by Samantha Harvey – Arcola Theatre, London

Like the much-loved novel on which it is based, Dominic Dromgoole’s production, and Samantha Harvey’s adaptation of A Quartet in Autumn is mini-masterpiece of understated human dynamics. Barbara Pym’s book, written late in her career after she had finally achieved recognition, is set in an office and deals with four people who’ve worked together for years – two men and two women. The women are retiring soon, which bring various levels of reckoning with purpose of existence, or lack of it. Lettie (Kate Duchêne is single and contemplating retiring to the country to live with her friend. Marcia (Pooky Quesnel) is defensive and reclusive, and has had ‘an operation’ she refuses to explain. Norman (Paul Rider) is bitter and enjoys provoking the women, although there is unresolved tension with Marcia. Edwin (Anthony Calf) is a widower devoted to the Church of England, but troubled by its decline.

The novel is a terrifying insight into what 1970s life was like for an older generation, baffling to those who didn’t experience it themselves. There is an underlying terror of war, especially from Marcia who hoards tins. The everyday sexism is jaw dropping, whether from Norman who deliberately uses it to goad the women, or Edwin who is casually patronising. And everyone is obsessed with status and social acceptability – whether growing a laburnum over your door will be seen as ‘too much’, or indeed whether anything will. Samantha Harvey, fresh from her Booker Prize win with ‘Orbital’ does not mess around with any of these, translating the subtleties of the way the characters talk to one another within minimal fuss into a dramatic structure that plays out beautifully on Ellie Wintour’s quadruple desk set. It’s not often that the inherently static nature of a drama has been so well used to such strong effect.

The exceptionally well-drawn roles are a delight for the performers. Anthony Calf is both deeply complacent and troubled by the many things he can’t understand. Paul Rider is very convincing as man with a lifetime’s resentment he can’t prevent from bubbling over. Pooky Quesnel is spiky and affronted as a woman intent on destroying herself without realising. But the stand-out performance comes from Kate Duchêne, who is heart-breaking as someone finally realising she can take control of her life, and very funny too. Her story about thinking she’s spotted an old friend collapsed on a station platform, getting closer and hearing her tell people to ‘fuck off’, thinking it can’t possibly be her, then wondering whether her modes of expression might have changed in the decades since she saw her, then deciding to walk away, is classic Barbara Pym, which Duchêne absolutely relishes. The only weaknesses in the production are Pym’s – although the bizarre fate of Marcia could be read as black comedy, in which case it seems slightly less over the top. The production, which is thoroughly absorbing, faithfully transmits her signature combination of apparent social conservatism blanketing deeply waspish and perceptive social critique.

Care

May 21, 2026May 21, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Care by Alexander Zeldin – Young Vic, London

Published at Plays International

Alexander Zeldin’s Care begins before the audience has realised. The Young Vic stage is transformed into a care home sitting room and, as they file in, Taru Devani’s Aditi sits slumped in a wheelchair, staring fixedly at nothing. Most people seem not to notice. The final stage of life when, as elderly, dependent people, we are looked after out of sight, is the focus of Care. It is notable how much of what Zeldin shows, despite being an inherent part of everyday life, is unfamiliar on stage.

Rosanna Vize’s set is hyper-realistic, down to the hand sanitiser, wipe-clean armchairs and reproduction pictures. It is a functional, depressing and entirely familiar setting. Here, a group of elderly people are looked after by two overworked members of staff. Each is in a different world of their own, struggling to understand where they have ended up, or to communicate. New arrival Joan, played by Linda Bassett, thinks her family will take her home soon. When they visit, it is soon clear she can never live with them again. The play is the story of her time in the care home and, without giving too much away, it is intimately concerned with death.

Zeldin, who also directs, has written a play which he describes as influenced by Harold Pinter, but also shows the influence of Caryl Churchill. The dialogue among the residents is fragmented, full of confusion, pauses and non-sequiturs as they wrestle with their diminishing realities, but it is also fully realistic and beautifully observed. The presence of Linda Bassett is a reminder of Churchill’s Escaped Alone, which she starred in: another play about aging and death which foregrounds the apparently inconsequential chatter of everyday life, revealing it to be full of significance. Care does something similar, examining the apparent banality of the strategies we use to cling onto life, Bassett’s performance is extraordinary, among an exceptional cast. Arriving confident but confused, she changes before our eyes, experiencing rage, despair, and strange, unexpected joy on her journey.

Rosie Cavaliero is remarkable as her anguished daughter, Lynn, widowed and struggling with two teenage boys. William Lawlor plays elder son Laurie with the perfect blend of teen social terror and obnoxiousness, and his aggressive relationship with his younger brother Robbie (an excellent Ethan Malony on press night, alternating with Charlie Webb) is one of the most uncomfortable and convincing sibling relationships seen on stage.

The other care home residents give universally stunning performances, full of carefully physically observed movement: Diana Payan as a tiny Paula, Ann Mitchell as confused otter-fancier Agnes, Winston Sookham as Eugene, drifting through the background. Richard Durden is responsible for two of several heart-stopping moments during the evening, suddenly breaking into song, and stripping to his incontinence underwear to hug Joan, who settles for affection from someone who thinks she’s his dead wife. Hayley Carmichael, as Simone, is a disruptive force, constantly challenging authority, discussing sex and demanding wine, while Agnes accuses her of having been ‘a woman of the night’. Overseeing the residents is Llewella Gideon’s head nurse Hazel, a towering performance as the emotional centre of the play, and her naïve assistant Fanta (Aoife Gaston) who we delight in seeing grow into her job.

Zeldin’s direction is not perfect – the production has some pacing issues which may well be ironed out during the run, and the rhythm of the residents’ disconnected dialogue requires an intense precision which is not always achieved. The play also has occasional weaknesses, and the sub-plot around the death of Lynn’s husband feels like a distraction. However, Care is an impressive achievement. At times it is very funny. Hayley Carmichael has some of the best lines (“Your otters don’t mean shit to me”).

It is also incredibly sad, and very moving. A lengthy, silent scene, in which Hazel gives Joan, naked to the waist, a bed bath is firstly shocking, then tender and moving. A final death scene represents the process of dying – rasping, alternate breaths as the body shuts down – with an accuracy perhaps never seen before on stage, despite the innumerable stage deaths across theatrical history. Zeldin’s decision to have characters who have died sit in the audience is a small piece of genius. No one who sees this play will forget it, and few will leave dry-eyed.

Handle With Care

May 12, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Handle With Care by Ontoerend Goed – Camden People’s Theatre, London

Ontoerend Goed are masters and mistresses of theatre-making, maintaining an unerring focus on the question, generally overlooked, of why we – the audience – are there. In doing so, they are very willing to break through the boundaries of what we consider theatre to be. This reaches an apogee with Handle With Care, in which they do actually turn up. The entireity of the show is contained on a box delivered to the theatre and placed on the stage, alongside cards on each seat which read “The performance begins when someone opens the box”. It is a delightful and rather brilliant conceit. I don’t know whether anyone has ever failed to open the box, but on the night I attended someone got down to it straight away. Eventually wearing a cap, provided, reading ‘Not the director’ they initiated a train of instructions setting out the dramaturgy for the performance, and bringing various audience members into carry out tasks.

Without giving too much away, the point is that every performance will be different, as it made by audience content, engagement and attitudes. Of course, all theatre is different every time, but Handle With Care swings the focus away from the stage to the people who attend every night, who are the cause of what happens on stage, and also the difference. With subtle touches, Ontoerend Goed open up the potential for moments of deep reflection, startling emotion, unexpected exuberbance and spontaneous creativity. Can an audience fill an hour essentially entertaining itself? Handle With Care shows that yes, they emphatically can. Simply occupying a space with strangers is one of humanity’s most powerful and underutilised resources. Ontoerend Goed make most theatre seem shallow and naïve, cutting directly through to what matters with uncanny precision. In some ways, all of their cumulative experience and power as a company is contained in this magical box.