Ostrich - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

​​Isla Fairfield’s Ostrich is what happens when grief gets rebranded as a hot girl summer. Tilly has lost her mum, broken up with the love of her life and decided that the obvious solution is to leave her small-town life in Fife behind for London. New city, new job, new friends, new shagging prospects. If she keeps moving, perhaps she won’t have to think about what she has left behind.

Tilly’s ferocity and distinctly Scottish humour are the perfect disguise for her fragility. Her attempt at a hot girl summer sees her take on a new job, head off on holiday with the girls and shag her way around the capital. But Ostrich quickly makes clear that distraction is not the same thing as escape. Moving cities doesn’t cure grief, and beneath the bravado are the misogyny of modern dating, the realities of class and the uncomfortable question of whether you can really outrun the things you are trying not to face.

Fairfield is a fantastic storyteller and an even better world-builder. She moves effortlessly between Fife, Barcelona and London, populating each place with a brilliant collection of characters: the good cunts, the bad cunts and, naturally, the posh cunts. She is also a hugely physical performer, using every inch of the stage to give these characters their own presence and personality. The result is a solo performance that never feels lonely.

There is an added cleverness in the use of a narrator who keeps Tilly honest. Tilly is an unreliable narrator, constantly trying to reshape her own story into something she can live with, and the narrator provides a necessary challenge to her version of events. It stops the show becoming simply a celebration of the chaotic single life and instead lets us see the grief underneath it. The jokes land harder because we understand what Tilly is trying to hide.

Ostrich is funny, filthy and full of heart, but its real strength is Fairfield herself. She has the comic timing, physicality and storytelling ability to command a stage alone, while creating a world that feels considerably bigger than the room we are sitting in. By the end, the crowd went wild for Fairfield, and it is safe to say that if this is the beginning of her Scot Girl Summer, I really hope Ostrich is not the only season we get. The Fringe may have just discovered a new big Scottish talent.

Lee Hutchison

4/5 

Runs until August 6th at the Gilded Balloon Patter House.