Likewise - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

WARNING: Contains major spoilers ​

Likewise begins with Joey calling a suicide hotline. Before she knows it, a cry for help has turned into flirtation with Jake, a 22-year-old man who comes over almost immediately, and Joey loses her virginity. Written and performed by Kiera Moran, Joey initially feels like the sort of messy, charismatic young woman who might have wandered out of an early-2000s Sundance indie. She is funny, lonely and self-absorbed, and Moran makes her instantly likeable. It is easy to settle into Joey's version of events because she is our narrator, and because she is so good at making herself the centre of the story.

Joey has spent a quiet summer largely confined to the house, leaving only when her mum takes away her phone. Her friendship with Callie has broken down, and the flashbacks to their relationship initially suggest little more than the awkwardness of teenage friendship. Joey interrupts Callie when she tries to open up, talks over her experiences and seems incapable of recognising that the world might contain things that are not about her. Callie, played by Phoebe Golfinos, eventually returns from what Joey dismisses as "space camp", only for us to discover that it was actually an amazing NASA internship. More importantly, Callie had left because she had been sexually assaulted by Jake.

That revelation completely changes what we have been watching. Jake is also the man who has been using his position on the suicide helpline to flirt with and pursue Joey. The two girls realise they have both encountered him, yet Joey cannot initially accept that their experiences can coexist. Since her first night she has continued messaging Jake, flirting with him and seeing him, while insisting that what happened to her was different. Eventually she admits the horrifying truth: he was someone who would hate fuck, and she "just let him". Then comes the line that cuts through Joey's self-protective logic: "He raped Callie."

It is here that Likewise becomes considerably more than a story about two teenage girls and a predatory man but what Joey's inability to understand Callie's experience says about the society around her. Callie is Latina; Joey is white. Their friendship becomes a miniature version of a much larger American dynamic: one person can experience an abusive system as an existential threat while another can encounter the same system and convince herself that it isn't really happening.

That makes Jake an especially potent figure in the play. He can be read as a Trump-like presence: an abusive man who has repeatedly demonstrated who he is, yet remains capable of convincing people that their experience with him is somehow different. Joey becomes a particularly uncomfortable stand-in for white America. She is not initially presented as cruel. Quite the opposite. She is funny, vulnerable and recognisably human. That is precisely why her gradual willingness to minimise what happened to Callie is so disturbing. She does not have to become a monster to participate in the harm. She simply has to decide that her own experience matters more.

The comparison becomes particularly pointed when placed against America's voting patterns. White women have repeatedly provided significant support for Trump. At the same time, Trump has repeatedly faced accusations and legal findings surrounding sexual misconduct, while his political movement has pursued policies with profound consequences for minority communities and women's reproductive rights. The point Likewise makes is not that every white woman who voted for Trump is Joey, nor that every minority voter shares Callie's experience. It is about the uncomfortable privilege of being able to decide that an abusive person's behaviour is somebody else's problem.

Joey can keep texting Jake because, in her mind, Jake has not harmed her in the same way. Callie does not have that luxury. That distinction is devastating. It speaks to the way power can become normalised when its consequences are unevenly distributed. Many Americans could tell themselves that Trump would not come for them, that the rhetoric was just rhetoric, that the chaos would somehow remain somebody else's problem. For minority communities, immigrants, women and others targeted by his rhetoric and policies, the stakes were never quite so abstract.

Moran's performance is crucial to making this work. Joey's main character syndrome is initially charming because we are encouraged to see the world through her eyes. As the truth emerges, that same charm becomes uncomfortable. We have been complicit in accepting her version of events because she is the person telling us the story. Likewise therefore asks us to consider how easily sympathy can become selective: whose pain do we believe, whose experience do we prioritise, and how much evidence do we require before admitting that someone we like is capable of doing terrible things?

There is ultimately something hopeful in Joey's reckoning with Callie, because the play allows her to recognise what she could not initially see. That is where the Trump analogy becomes most powerful. America cannot remain in this state of denial forever. At some point, there has to be an acknowledgement that the warnings were there, that the behaviour was not accidental, and that the people who were most vulnerable were telling the truth all along. Joey's eventual recognition of what happened to Callie becomes a small, painful version of the reckoning that Likewise seems to hope America might one day have with itself. Likewise understands that the most dangerous form of denial is not always hatred. Sometimes it is the comforting belief that because the abuse hasn't reached you yet, it isn't really happening.

Lee Hutchison

4.5 /5 

Runs until August 22nd at Greenside Riddles Court