by Diana Miranda
Delightfully ludicrous, The Importance of Being Earnest under Mark Beer’s direction captures the sarcastic humour so well-embedded in Wilde’s satire. Through spot-on characterisation, strong performances and a detailed set, this fringe show takes us on a time-travelling ride to London’s 19th Century high-tea culture, where appearances are of the utmost importance.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
Led by the Wind is a queer story that follows K (Kiki Ye), a young woman from Fuyang, China living in the United Kingdom. She has been convinced by her family back home to go on a blind date with Bryan (He Zhang), who, according to her family’s standards, is the perfect husband material. As their relationship progresses K starts zoning out, sinking deeper into beautiful dreamscapes with Windy (Vivi Wei), a mysterious woman that represents K’s deepest queer desires. In order to unveil the process of writing this piece, and to deconstruct the complexity of K’s character, I caught up with director Kiki Ye.
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by an anonymous guest critic
Casey Jay Andrews is a regular fixture at the Fringe. She is a purveyor of small, touching stories and beautifully constructed set designs. For this piece, she tells the story of Freddie, born during a meteor storm, who returns to her family home in the woods now inhabited only by her grandad and his Scottie dog. The meteor storm has returned 33 years on, and she and her grandad go out to watch the shooting stars. Meanwhile, her grandad has a secret he has not shared with her.
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by Laura Kressly
Safaris evoke the dynamic of the self and the other, the watcher and the watched. As an activity, it has a colonial legacy where the ‘civilised’ travel to faraway lands to observe ‘exotic’ people and wildlife in their native habitat. More widely, considering safari’s aspect of watching, it links to the gendered phenomenon of the male gaze. In this short performance piece-cum-installation, these differing, contemporary conceptualisations of the safari converge, prompting the audience to consider how women’s bodies – especially those from the Global Majority – are exoticised, othered and preyed on in a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal society.
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by an anonymous guest critic
Lightning Ridge is a playfully-told family show about a rural Australian mining community. The trouble starts when Kelly-Ann’s two imaginary friends go missing, and the whole village has to come together to find them.
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by Laura Kressly
Jess and Victoria are best pals and girlbosses extraordinaire. As a response to what they see as too much sadness in the world, they’ve developed a five-step approach to “change ourselves and those around us”. The satire of self-help seminars, relentless positivity in the face of personal and societal collapse, and late-stage capitalism’s grifter culture is smart and initially silly, but underpinned by a serious message.
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by an anonymous guest critic
This show is the very modern telling of a witch trial that you’ve likely never heard of. In 1605, in a small town in Oxfordshire after an altercation at a football match, Brian Gunter tries to get his neighbour Elizabeth Gregory hung as a witch, blaming his daughter Annie’s mysterious illness on her. Without wanting to spoil the story, it doesn’t quite work out as he planned.
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by an anonymous guest critic
Hannah Maxwell is back at the Fringe with her second show after 2019’s charming I, AmDram. This one is similar. It’s about what happened next for Hannah – moving back to Luton to care for her recently bereaved grandma. A show about 30-something angst, obsession and stalking should not be charming, but Maxwell manages to make it so.
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by an anonymous guest critic
Working in a funeral home is no fun, but it’s even worse when you encounter somebody you knew while at work. For Rachel, it is the body of a man who sexually assaulted her 11 months ago – a nightmare scenario if ever there was one. Rachel is more calm and professional than anybody could believably expect in these circumstances. As she begins the process of embalming, she recounts the story to the audience whilst working through her feelings of anger, guilt and frustration, and of how she drove her family away and retreated from the world.
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by Laura Kressly
Adam Mickiewicz is widely considered Poland’s equivalent to Shakespeare. His play Dziady is split into four parts, the second of which inspires this ritualistic, highly visual performance. Created by Song of the Goat Theatre founder Grzegorz Bral and performed in Polish, excellent design and heightened emotion communicate universal feelings around death and grief despite the language barrier.
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The Play's The Thing UK 