Join the Club! A Story About the Sex You Never Wanted - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Kate Daley puts on one of the most fascinating and layered performances of this year's Fringe in Join the Club! A Story About the Sex You Never Wanted. What initially appears to be a funny, candid exploration of modern dating gradually becomes something much more complex: an examination of how we perform versions of ourselves in order to survive experiences we would rather not confront.

Daley arrives on stage looking almost like an everyday American teenager. Baggy jeans, a colourful hooped hoodie and an earnestness that makes her feel like a youthful Rory Gilmore. She tells us about her early sexual experiences, her first boyfriend, buying her first vibrator and her frustration at struggling to climax. At first, there is an apparent excitement about sex and the possibilities it offers. But life has moved on. Now everyone on her Instagram seems to be getting engaged, and she finds herself navigating the chaotic hellscape of modern dating while trying to work out what she actually wants.

The show initially feels like Daley is talking to a therapist. Then that relationship shifts. Suddenly, we are not simply an audience but participants in something resembling a seminar, welcomed into a safe space and invited to join her club. It is an important distinction because Daley is constantly playing with the boundaries between performer and person, character and confession.

That shift is made physical through one of the show's most striking moments. Daley changes out of the hoodie and jeans and returns in black tights, a lace top and mini skirt. It feels like more than a costume change. She has moved from the almost wholesome, youthful Rory Gilmore figure into another constructed version of herself, one that feels more consciously sexual and performative. The change becomes a visual representation of the different selves she has had to inhabit, and of the way identity can become something we put on depending on what a situation demands of us.

That becomes the show's most compelling device: performance itself. Daley tells us that she studied acting, spending $100,000 on her degree, and she shares that she is determined to get her money's worth. She does so by turning herself into a character of herself. She even borrows the language of theatre to describe her sexual experiences, referring to the men she encounters as her "scene partners". Sex becomes another performance, another scene to get through, another opportunity to inhabit a role.

The acting is therefore not simply a theatrical flourish. It becomes a mechanism for understanding trauma. On stage, Daley is personable, funny and disarmingly sweet. She knows how to command a room and how to make us laugh. But as the performance progresses, that mask begins to slip. The character she has constructed becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the woman underneath it. Is this Daley acting? Is she using the techniques of performance to process what has happened to her? Or are we finally seeing something closer to her real self? The uncertainty is what makes the performance so fascinating.

There is something utterly fascinating in watching someone use acting to protect themselves from their own story while simultaneously using that same acting to tell it. Daley can step behind the mask whenever she needs to, but the more she performs, the more visible the person underneath becomes. The stage becomes both a safe space and a place of exposure and Daley uses performance to make vulnerability visible. 

By the end, Daley puts the hoodie and jeans back on. The American teenager, the Rory Gilmore figure, returns. But it is impossible to see that costume in quite the same way. We have watched her construct and dismantle several versions of herself, and now she is putting another one back on. Perhaps this is another mask. Perhaps it is simply another part of who she is. Daley's tightly constructed 45-minute script covers an extraordinary amount of ground. Humour sits alongside shame, dating alongside trauma, and sexual desire alongside assault.

Most importantly, she invites us to join her club: a space where people who have experienced sexual abuse can find safety, connection and understanding. Having spent the show demonstrating how performance can conceal vulnerability and  Join the Club! ultimately suggests that acting is not always about pretending to be someone else. Sometimes it is the language we use when the truth is too difficult to say any other way.

Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs until August 30th at Paradise in Augustines