CVNTCLAVE - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Created, written and performed by Arden Fitzroy, CVNTCLAVE is a one-Cardinal show about power, faith, manipulation from a queer perspective. CVNTCLAVE is exactly the kind of Fringe show I was always going to be excited about. Directed by Megan Brewer, whose work has already featured in two of our favourite five-star Fringe shows across the past two years, Do Astronauts Masturbate in Space? and Parasocial Activity, alongside this year's Hater, which I adored, this was always going to be highly anticipated.

The premise gives Fitzroy plenty of room to have fun with the Vatican's peculiar combination of absolute power and enforced decorum. With the cardinals sequestered away to decide who will become the next Pope, every rivalry has to be conducted through whispers, insinuation and carefully disguised acts of sabotage rather than anything as gauche as an open confrontation. At the centre of it all is Cardinal Cvntvs, navigating this bizarre little pressure cooker of ambition, resentment and suppressed desire while attempting to ensure that the Papacy doesn't go to the wrong man.

The title itself is perhaps the biggest hint at the kind of take CVNTCLAVE is going for. Conclave is already a wonderfully ripe premise for this sort of treatment: put a group of powerful, deeply repressed men in elaborate robes, lock them away together and ask them to decide who gets to be Pope, and there is almost limitless potential for camp, hypocrisy and bitchiness. CVNTCLAVE knows exactly how much fun there is to be had in taking that world and giving it a thoroughly cunty twist.

The script itself is dense, almost biblical in its construction. Fitzroy delivers it with the measured, ritualistic quality of a religious ceremony, moving through the space with the quiet deliberateness of a priest performing a service. There is something appropriately restrained about the pace, as though we are watching the machinery of the Church operate behind closed doors. It does mean the show can feel slow at times, and the sharper anger towards the Catholic Church arrives relatively late, but that restraint does make those moments of frustration and fury land with greater force.

There is, however, a sense that CVNTCLAVE has an even more deliciously chaotic show hiding inside it. The premise and setting offer so many opportunities for comedy, camp and outright bitchiness that aren't always fully exploited. For a play inspired by Conclave, it sometimes feels like it wants to be Mean Girls just as much. And honestly, I wish it leaned further in that direction.

The lighting is particularly effective, helping to transform the space and adding visual interest to a production that is necessarily dominated by a single performer and a very text-heavy script. Brewer's direction similarly keeps the eye engaged, finding ways to make the performance feel theatrical even when the material becomes particularly dense.

Most importantly, Fitzroy makes the audience feel as though we are genuinely part of the confessional. We aren't simply watching Cardinal Cvntvs confess his sins; we become the people he has chosen to confess them to. That intimacy works by drawing us into his world of faith, hypocrisy, ambition and increasingly questionable morality.

CVNTCLAVE is an intriguing exploration of the gap between what the Catholic Church claims to represent and the very human impulses that exist underneath its robes. There is plenty here to enjoy, and when it embraces its campier, more vicious side, you can see just how much fun this concept could be. I just found myself wanting more of that Mean Girls energy, more queer chaos and perhaps a little less restraint.

Lee Hutchison

3/5

Runs at Greenside George Street until August 29th