Lyn's Edinburgh Review Roundup 2025: Week 1

Oliver Ayres’ show is called I’m Ready to Talk Now (Traverse). Only he’s not. But there are many different ways to be eloquent, and Ayres finds his own way in this delicate, disquieting one-on-one show in which you – the only audience member-- get tucked up in a hospital bed while Ayres talks about his experience of spending long periods in hospital and becoming disabled by an autoimmune disease. Grief, he says, is like a black hole. It never gets smaller, but you get bigger to accommodate it.

Theatre talks a lot about being an empathy machine, and it often is, putting us in someone else’s shoes for a while. Here, with Ayres present in the room but his words being fed to you through headphones, you are not in someone’s shoes but in Ayres’ hospital bed; you become him, trapped in the liminal space of the hospital, quite static as the world outside spins. It’s a bit like an out-of-body experience.

I'm Ready to Talk Now. Image credit: Dijana Risteska.

This is a performance made with such care even as it tells of a medical system that failed him and blamed him for his illness. Ayres wasn’t always looked after as he should have been, so he ensures that we are. He has a gift for paying attention.

In Hannah Moscovitch’s Red Like Fruit, also at the Traverse, journalist Lauren has not been paying attention to her buried feelings and memories in the years since she was a teenager. But now, as she works on a story about domestic abuse in which a man found guilty of assault is rehabilitated while his victim is denigrated, she starts to experience mental health issues.

So, she writes her story down and gets a male friend to narrate it back to her. Why? Because we are all so used to hearing the authority afforded men’s voices. We listen to them in a way we don’t listen to women. Just as Ayre’s I’m Ready to Talk Now operates with a kind of double vision, so does this devastating two-hander, which hails from Canada, offering a thoughtful update in the post-#MeToo era and reminding us how women will continue to internalise their experiences and dismiss them as part of growing up unless, like Lauren, they find a way to give voice. This is a stylish, short, sharp shock of a play.

Red Like Fruit, image credit: Riley Smith.

The climate emergency has been a significant theme in work at the Edinburgh Fringe over the last few years, but nobody has tackled it with quite the wit and lightness of touch of the new musical Hot Mess (Pleasance Courtyard), written by Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote, the team behind the much-acclaimed 42 Balloons.

When Earth (Danielle Steers) and Hu (Tobias Turley)—short for Humanity—first meet, it’s not love at first sight. After all, she’s still getting over the hook-up with Tyrannosaurus Rex. “I’m not picky; I’m naturally selective,” she says, but she would like to meet the one. Just so long as he’s a tiny bit more resistant to meteorites.

But when they do get together, they are each other’s world, the original power couple. But millennia pass, and although initially when Earth shows the hard-working Hu the abundance of oil and coal in the world the future looks bright, it’s not long before love begins to dim.

Heading to the Southwark Playhouse in mid-October, this is clever, witty stuff, a musical with brains as well as terrific songs, neat design and lovely performance. It’s a complete package and a certain hit.

Paldem (Summerhall) is another relationship drama. But it comes with a twist. Written by David Jonsson, who wrote Rye Lane, it tells of Megan (Tash Cowley) and videographer Kevin (Michael Workeye), former university lovers now best pals who have another one-night stand, one that accidentally gets filmed. “We’re hot,” declares Megan. “I like watching you, watching,” says Kevin. So why not monetise that? Everyone else does. Soon they are racking up the views on OnlyFans and are rated #2 on Interracial. But when it’s all performance and no emotion, what does that do to a relationship?

Paldem.

Jonsson’s script is full of witty exchanges. Meg tells Kevin that having sex with him is “like supervising a child chasing a garden worm.” But while Jonsson gives us the foreplay, he doesn’t really follow through with the emotional fallout, and issues around race and class are just tacked on. There is perhaps a longer, deeper, more satisfying play here trying to get out.

If Hot Mess boasts a great concept, The Uncrackable Case (Pleasance Courtyard) does too. Good title too. Jamie Walsh’s fairytale-inspired musical, which puts documentary maker Jill (of Jack and Jill) in the dock as she is tried for the murder of influencer Humpty Dumpty, is much less oven-ready than Hot Mess and is made by a team just setting out on their musical theatre journey.

It has charm, but not yet substance or focus, and whereas Hot Mess has a very clear grasp of its audience—the same young audiences who flock to Six—The Uncrackable Case is not quite so sure-footed, stranded between being family-friendly and something much more grown-up. But few musicals arrive at the festival quite as oven-ready as Hot Mess, and The Uncrackable Case is just one of many that will be meeting an audience for the first time and may yet hatch its way to fringe success.

The Uncrackable Case. Design by Steph Pyne. Photo credit: David Lindsay.

Shakespeare is very much alive and kicking on the fringe. Sometimes being given a good kicking too. At Summerhall you can see the Polish Song of the Goat Theatre in a late-night version of Hamlet, which has much in common with opera and comes wrapped in the trappings of a wake with all the violent emotion that entails.

A body lies on a bed; the protagonists gather, dressed in black. Everyone gets agitated, and occasionally snippets from Shakespeare’s play emerge, and the relationships start to come into focus. Laertes appears to be a little too much in love with his sister, Ophelia. The singing is searing and undeniably beautiful, but the emotion is operatic too, and the whole thing is pitched at such a high emotional level that it is quite exhausting to watch and made me want to hide under my seat.

Far more successful is Lost Lear (Summerhall), Dan Colley’s clever show about how we perceive reality and the gulfs that raises between us, which is set in a care home where former actress Joy lives with dementia. In an experimental treatment the staff play along with her belief that she is in rehearsal for a production of King Lear—a role she did indeed once play. But the arrival of her middle-aged son, whom she abandoned as a baby, threatens to shatter the illusion.

Lost Lear. Image credit: Ste Murray.

Colley’s drama refashions Shakespeare’s play into a clever and multi-layered drama which examines theatre itself and the roles we play in life but also our ability to remember, forget and forgive. Even the most unbearable hurts.

Cover photo from Hot Mess, starring Tobias Turley and Danielle Steers. Photo by Mark Senior. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs until the 25th of August. For the full programme visit here.