Motorway - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Motorway is a hard play to review and an easy one to recommend. It is the kind of show where saying too much risks taking away from the experience, so the less you know going in, the better. Written by Daniel Cuckow and Abigail Sinclair, it is a strange, funny and increasingly mysterious piece of theatre that rewards simply giving yourself over to its world.

Maeve (Samantha Begeman) and Lucy (Abigail Sinclair) run a motorway-side canteen across the road from a military base. Lucy fills the empty hours with cocaine; Maeve, seemingly the more sedate of the two, keeps topping up the coffee for their two regular and only customers. Their friendship has always been defined by a shifting dynamic. Maeve supported Lucy from nursery until a head injury changed everything, and now it is Lucy who takes the lead. The history between them is funny, affectionate and quietly unsettling, particularly as the roles continue to reverse. The woman who once pissed herself is now the one looking after the friend who does.

Dominic Bryant plays Felix, Maeve’s partner, while Cuckow appears as the mysterious Dr Rudmore, whose connection to Maeve adds another layer to a story that seems determined to keep changing shape. There are aliens, mysterious doctors, tap dancing, cocaine and weak bladders, and somehow Motorway manages to make all of these things feel like part of the same carefully constructed universe.

It would be easy to describe the show as throwing absurdist ideas at the wall, but that would seriously undersell what Cuckow and Sinclair have created. Beneath the apparent looseness is an incredibly precise vision. The closest comparison is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: not because the two are particularly similar in story, but because both place you inside a world where everything feels deliberately strange. You sense that there is a logic to it all, even when you don’t yet understand what that logic is. The audience is not necessarily being asked to solve the mystery so much as to inhabit it.

That confidence extends to every aspect of the production. Begeman and Sinclair give star-making performances, completely understanding the tone of the piece and each other. Their chemistry makes the friendship at its centre feel lived-in, while the shifts in power between them give the comedy a sharper edge. Everyone knows exactly what their role is within this peculiar world, and the performances never feel as though they are competing with the material.

The same is true of the production itself. The set, music and props all feel meticulously considered, while the smallest details become part of the show’s strange rhythm. Even something as simple as pouring a cup of coffee feels choreographed without ever appearing choreographed. That is perhaps the greatest achievement of Motorway: so much thought has gone into creating this world that, when it works, it looks effortless.

Lee Hutchison

4.5 / 5 
Runs until August 30th at Zoo Playground