Jitters - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

​Ellen Robertson and Charly Clive, better known as the double act Britney, bring their sharp comic chemistry to Jitters, a two-hander about ownership, tradition and perhaps the most important “L” word in any relationship: leverage.

In the hour before her wedding, 31-year-old Charlotte finds herself face-to-face with her soon-to-be stepdaughter, El, who is the same age as her. Charlotte is about to marry El’s 61-year-old father after a seven-month romance, just a few years after El and her father lost their mother. It is an arrangement almost designed to create tension, and the two women could hardly be more different. Charlotte embodies a more traditional, heteronormative worldview, focused on marriage, appearances and the security that comes with them. El is queer, liberal and far more sceptical of the structures Charlotte embraces.

The staging is brilliantly simple. In the back room of a church, the two spend almost the entire show facing one another, El leaning against a filing cabinet packed with communion wine while Charlotte repeatedly fixes her make-up. It becomes a kind of battleground, with neither woman needing to go anywhere because the real movement is happening in the conversation. The script is packed with biting one-liners and brilliantly observed comedy as these opposing worldviews slowly begin to collide.

But Jitters becomes much more interesting when the argument moves beyond their obvious differences and into class. Charlotte comes from a scrappy working-class background, where marriage, stability and getting on in life carry a very different weight. El, meanwhile, has the privilege of being able to take a more uncompromisingly liberal view of the world because she has the safety net of family wealth behind her. Suddenly, the supposedly simple liberal-versus-traditional argument becomes much messier. How much of our politics are really our own when we have never had to worry about the things someone else has?

It is to Jitters’ credit that it knows exactly what tropes this kind of clash could fall into and spends much of its time gleefully playing with them. Neither woman is quite as simple as she first appears, and the more they talk, the more their positions start to unravel. What begins as a brilliantly funny confrontation between two very different women develops into something much more pointed about class, privilege, family and the ways people use relationships as a form of power.

Lee Hutchison

4.5 / 5 

Runs at Summerhall until August 21st.