Down To The Felt - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025

One of my most anticipated productions of this year’s Fringe marks the return of Claudia Osborne to Edinburgh. After her stand out performance in last year’s highlight Bachelor Girls, Osborne now takes on the dual role of co-writer (alongside Jude Burrows) and director, delivering a dystopian story that feels at once terrifyingly unreal and disturbingly close to home

Set in an alternate present where a totalitarian regime has criminalised homosexuality, Osborne and Burrows’ script refuses to deal in abstraction. Instead, it brings us into the cramped, claustrophobic world of three people simply trying to live and love as honestly as they can. Ailith (Lizzie Kilbride), her  “husband” Ethan (Sam Bain), and Ethan’s lover Gabriel (Burrows) share a fragile sanctuary together, holding tight to their secret happiness. But Ailith’s job as a defence attorney places her under the scrutiny of the very system they are hiding from, and the threat of exposure looms with suffocating intensity.

The power of the piece lies in how it interrogates the quiet, everyday intimacy of queer love under oppression. How much of a relationship can you truly have when you cannot share a bed without fear, when a glass of wine together in public could turn into an act of betrayal if overheard by the wrong person? This setting and staging makes us feel and witness this constant precariousness in every moment - the stolen glance, the silence when someone enters the room, the sweat that clings to the actors’ skin. Kilbride, Bain, and Burrows all deliver performances of sorrow and power, every flicker of doubt and every burst of longing magnified by the production’s taut intimacy.

But the play’s resonance goes further than its fictional premise. What Down to the Felt lays bare is how fragile progress can be, how easily rights and freedoms can be stripped away. Though framed as an imagined dystopia, it is impossible to ignore the parallels with our present moment, where LGBTQI+ communities across the world are facing fresh waves of hostility, scapegoating, and legislative attack.  Osborne and Burrows force us to consider how close this “alternative future” really is, and what it means to love truthfully in a climate that punishes honesty. What emerges is a piece of theatre that is as emotionally devastating as it is politically urgent. 

Lee Hutchison

4/5
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​This show was watched on the last day of the festival.