Jealousy Play - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Rachel Isobel Heritage was the director of one of my best-rated shows from last year, Sluts with Consoles, so Jealousy Play was always going to be one of my most anticipated shows of the Fringe. We find her as a woman crouched with her back to the audience before she turns, introducing herself as Writer Rachel, Performer Rachel and the woman playing Joanne. This is apparently a play based on a true story, although not quite, and everything should be taken with "a pinch of salt". She calls it Jealousy Play, but quickly makes it clear that this is really a play about rage.

Joanne’s rage comes from a lifetime of watching opportunities slip through her fingers. She comes to realise that she is autistic as she reaches adulthood, falling down the Tumblr rabbit hole of mental health and neurodivergence and beginning to understand just how much of her life has been spent masking. That understanding is liberating, but also devastating. The more Joanne understands herself, the more she can see how poorly the world has been designed for someone like her. She is perpetually operating in survival mode.

At the centre of this is Neptune, the actress who becomes the embodiment of everything Joanne feels she has been denied. The two first collide during a school production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, after Joanne, who has the starring role, is forced to step away because of a throat infection. When she returns, Neptune has replaced her. Joanne believes the pain in her throat is connected to repressed anger, and it becomes a fitting metaphor for a woman who has spent years swallowing her frustration. Neptune, meanwhile, seems to glide through every door Joanne has spent her life trying to force open. She is not neurodivergent, comes from privilege and knows how to seize opportunities when they arrive.

The comparison becomes increasingly painful because Neptune’s success isn't presented as something she has necessarily stolen from Joanne. Instead, Jealousy Play asks what happens when two people with similar ambitions are given wildly different conditions in which to pursue them. Neptune goes to the best drama schools and eventually finds herself on stages including the West End and National Theatre. Joanne finishes an expensive qualification without representation, struggles to find work and ends up making cocktails in a pub. When she finally puts on her own Fringe show in 2021, even creating the work becomes an act of endurance. Her autism makes the relentless hustle of the arts exhausting, from the rigidity of her thinking to the constant changes, social demands and sensory overload of the Fringe. The tragedy is not that Joanne lacks talent or ambition. It is that she is constantly being asked to overcome barriers that Neptune simply doesn't have to think about.

Class sits heavily alongside neurodivergence here. Joanne reaches drama school only to encounter the relentless financial costs of pursuing a creative career, while attempts to question those barriers are met with the soul-crushing suggestion: “Is the industry right for you?” It is a question that exposes the circular logic of the arts. If the industry is structured around money, connections, confidence and an ability to navigate its unspoken rules, then telling working-class and neurodivergent people that they might not be suited to it conveniently disguises the fact that they have never been given a fair chance to begin with.

That lack of support extends beyond the professional world. One of the play's most powerful moments comes when Joanne returns to her family home to discover that the controlled chaos of her bedroom has been boxed up and reorganised. To somebody else, it might look like help. To Joanne, it is another environment that has been changed without her understanding or consent. Her resulting breakdown is raw because Heritage understands that support isn't simply doing something for someone. If you don't understand what they need and want, your attempt to help can become another source of distress.

There is also something particularly brutal about Joanne's relationship with rejection. Her experience of RSD around a London theatre showcase, combined with the lack of representation waiting for her at the end of her course, captures how quickly disappointment can become evidence for someone who already feels the world is telling them they don't belong. Meanwhile, Neptune keeps progressing. Every success makes Joanne's failures feel more personal, even though the play continually reminds us that they are structural.

That is what makes Jealousy Play much more than a story about envy. Neptune becomes a kind of alternate timeline for Joanne: a vision of what might have happened if talent had been accompanied by privilege, support and the ability to move through the industry without constantly fighting against its structures. Joanne isn't simply jealous of Neptune's career. She is grieving the version of her own life she believes she could have had.

Heritage turns that grief into something increasingly furious. There is a brutal sadness to watching somebody who knows only performing struggle to make art in an environment that repeatedly makes doing so feel impossible. Yet Jealousy Play ultimately becomes a call to arms. Joanne's fight is bigger than Neptune, bigger than her own career and even bigger than the theatre industry. It is about who gets the opportunity to make art in the first place.

By the climax, the jealousy has become rage, and that rage feels entirely justified. Jealousy Play asks whether we can really call the arts a meritocracy when some people arrive with every possible advantage while others are expected to mask, struggle, pay more, work harder and somehow still prove they deserve to be there. But this isn't simply a play about everything that is wrong with the industry. It is a rallying cry for those who have been told they don't belong, and a demand that the doors to creativity are opened wider. There is something incredibly powerful about Heritage not just telling this story, but getting it onto a stage and making space for voices that are so often pushed to the margins. All credit to her for turning that rage into art, and that art into a call for change.

Lee Hutchison

5/5

Runs until August 22nd at Greenside Riddles Court