NON HUMAN ANIMAL - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Written and directed by Kat Woods, NON HUMAN ANIMAL is a dark Irish drama about grief, justice and the complicated aftermath of violence. Inspired by Woods' own experiences and real events, it follows a woman forced to confront the murder that has shaped almost every part of her life, and asks what justice can mean for the person left behind.

Róisín, played by Emily Tracey, is from County Fermanagh. Her father was murdered when she was a child and, years later, his killer is facing parole. Her mother is in poor physical and mental health and now in care, leaving Róisín to navigate the bureaucracy of being a victim alone. When she discovers a letter from her father's killer asking to meet the family, the past she has spent years trying to numb herself against suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.

There is an immediate sadness to Róisín, and Tracey makes that heaviness tangible. She rarely seems to experience much joy, instead spending hours scrolling social media, eating an apparently endless supply of Mini Mars Bars from beneath her dressing gown and rewatching Gilmore Girls. These routines are not simply quirks. They are ways of staying still, of avoiding a world that keeps asking her to confront something she has never been allowed to escape.

​The script from Woods is wonderfully dense and it is a sensational showcase for Tracey, who finds the humanity beneath Róisín's anger, exhaustion and grief. Woods' writing also finds an interesting way of complicating the idea of justice. Róisín is, technically, the victim, yet she is the one whose life has become restricted by what happened. Her father's killer may be the prisoner, but Róisín has spent years trapped indoors by the consequences of his crime, leaving the house only for trips to the shops or visiting her local GP.

Then, through a wonderfully strange quirk of fate, Róisín is referred to a weight-loss programme where her personal trainer is participating in a prison rehabilitation scheme. He is there after killing someone with a single punch, causing them to fall and fatally hit their head on the pavement. It a conicidence that does not feel convoluted and it gives Róisín something she has perhaps never had before: the chance to know a person who has taken another person's life and see them as something other than simply a killer.

That makes the prospect of meeting her father's killer all the more complicated. Before Róisín ever sits across from him, she has already encountered someone whose worst act does not tell the whole story of who they are. Her trainer is a person, a father, with his own life and circumstances, and that knowledge has the potential to shift how she sees the man who killed her father. It does not diminish what he did, nor does it ask Róisín to forgive him. Instead, it leaves her facing a much more difficult question: what happens when the person responsible for the worst thing that has ever happened to you could actually be a human being in their own right. 
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Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs until August 31st at the Gilded Balloon