Cellotape - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Cellotape is a powerful and remarkably brave piece of theatre. Written by first-year drama student Mel Grondin, the autobiographical psychological drama explores childhood abuse, coercion, memory and the ways trauma can distort our understanding of what happened to us. Most importantly, it shines a light on COCSA (Child-on-Child Sexual Abuse), referring to sexual abuse perpetrated by one child against another and an experience that is often absent from the narratives we use to understand abuse.

The play centres on two girls, Angel and her unnamed friend, and the power dynamic between them from around the ages of seven to fourteen. It is deliberately fragmented, jumping through time and blurring the boundaries between memory, intrusive thought, hallucination and lived experience. At first, watching two adults play seven-year-olds is understandably discombobulating, but once you settle into the language of the piece, the decision becomes increasingly effective. These are children trying to make sense of behaviour and feelings they simply do not have the emotional intelligence or vocabulary to understand.

At the centre of it all is Angel, a deeply contradictory character. She clearly cares about her friend, yet that affection sits alongside cruelty and control. She is quick to call her a weirdo or gay, to criticise her appearance and to undermine her confidence, while simultaneously pushing her towards physical intimacy. What begins as childish experimentation gradually becomes something much darker, with Angel repeatedly testing and crossing boundaries, eventually leading to an assault in the shower when they are still very young.

The fascination of Cellotape lies in those contradictions. Angel isn’t presented as a straightforward villain, nor does the play attempt to excuse what she does. Instead, we are left watching the uncomfortable collision between affection, manipulation, dependency and abuse. The question of power becomes increasingly difficult to ignore: who has agency, who is being controlled, and how do we understand the actions of a child who is herself clearly struggling?

Rose Antigoni Cahill is exceptional as Angel. It is an unsettling performance, precisely because of how convincingly she captures the character’s volatility and mental instability without reducing her to either a monster or a victim. Cahill has to navigate some extraordinarily difficult material, often within the same scene moving between childishness, affection, cruelty and something much more disturbing. In less capable hands, or with a script less assured of what it wants to explore, this could easily have become melodramatic or exploitative. Instead, Cahill makes Angel genuinely difficult to look away from.

Grondin, both as writer and performer, gives the other girl a much quieter presence for much of the play. That imbalance feels important. For years, her character is largely denied agency, pushed around by Angel and left trying to process experiences that are impossible for a child to properly comprehend. The fractured structure mirrors that lack of understanding; we experience events as fragments because trauma itself is rarely neat or chronological.

That makes the climax particularly powerful. After spending so much of the play watching Angel dominate both the relationship and the narrative, her friend finally gets to reclaim her voice. Her reflection on nearly seven years of abuse from seven to fourteen is powerful and we confront the question at the heart of the play: what could push a seven-year-old to behave like that?

It is an incredibly difficult question because Cellotape refuses to offer an easy answer. It doesn’t ask us to excuse Angel, but it does ask us to consider where behaviour comes from, how cycles of abuse can operate between children, and how impossible it can be to understand trauma while you are still living through it.

For a first-year drama student to take material this personal and confront such uncomfortable, under-discussed themes is hugely brave. Cellotape doesn’t always make for comfortable viewing, and nor should it. Its greatest strength is its willingness to trust its audience to wrestle with questions that don’t have simple answers. 

Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs until August 29th at TheSpaceUK