He's Six Years Older Than Me - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Taeyun Kim opens He’s Six Years Older Than Me reading I Hate Men, before quickly clarifying that she does not, in fact, hate men. It is a funny opening to a play that is far less interested in hating men than in examining what women are left carrying after sex.

A young woman is taking an STI test. That is the premise, and for much of the play Kim allows this seemingly mundane, clinical process to unfold almost in real time. Instructions are followed, a finger is pricked and allowed to bleed into a sample tube, a swab is inserted vaginally. There is nowhere to hide behind theatrical illusion. It is uncomfortable, intimate and remarkably brave, turning something most of us would consider private and procedural into real theatre.

But the STI kit is also the perfect centrepiece for a play about the often invisible labour of sex. The sexual encounters themselves are represented through interpretive dance, with bodies moving through fragments of memory as Cigarettes After Sex and atmospheric music lend the encounters a dreamy, sensual quality. Yet the aftermath is anything but dreamy. The pleasure, uncertainty or ambiguity of sex can leave a woman with appointments, tests, medication, anxiety and responsibility. The sexual act may be shared, but its consequences are often disproportionately hers to manage.

At the heart of the play is a nameless young woman reflecting on her encounters with a man six years older than her. The age gap becomes less about the number itself and more about the imbalance of experience, expectation and power that can exist between two people. Kim explores how easily sexual encounters can be remembered differently by the people involved, and how the things that might feel fleeting to one person can become something another has to physically and emotionally process long afterwards.

There is something particularly effective in placing these memories alongside the STI test. The clinical act strips sex of its romanticism. Suddenly it is not about how something looked or felt in the moment, but about what happened, what was risked and who is left dealing with it. 

Lee Hutchison

4/5 

Runs at Greenside Riddles Court until the 22nd