Other People - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

​There’s a wonderful quote in the movie Zola: “This is messy! You are messy! Your brain is broke!” It feels like the perfect summary of Other People, a darkly funny dinner party populated by a rogues’ gallery of 22-year-olds whose emotional intelligence is roughly where you’d expect it to be: still loading. Margot’s birthday celebration brings together three final-year university students and a former friend, and as the booze flows, old grievances and old and newer desires begin bubbling to the surface.

These characters are immature, self-important and occasionally infuriating, but that’s precisely what makes them so much fun to watch. They’re caught in that strange post-university limbo where everyone wants to appear sophisticated, ambitious and fully formed while still being, essentially, teenagers with better vocabulary. At times it even has the social awkwardness and arrested development of Peep Show, while the shifting female friendships carry a little of the complicated intimacy of Frances Ha.

The dinner party eventually descends into an extended card game, and it becomes a brilliant mechanism for stripping away the performance. Sexual truths emerge, repression starts to crack and feelings that have been carefully buried begin pushing their way out. These people are still teenagers at heart, and their relationships are a cocktail of hormones, history, sexual frustration, ambition and far too much alcohol. The play’s central idea that we are all performing, on stage and off it, feels particularly apt here because almost everyone is desperately trying to control how they are perceived.

Things take a more melodramatic turn towards the end, but I’m absolutely not complaining. If anything, it feels like Other People understands that sometimes you have to let the emotional chaos go completely off the rails. Fringe theatre could use more of that. Beneath all the posturing and petty arguments, these are people trying to work out who they are, what they want and how much of themselves they’re willing to reveal. It’s messy, horny, funny and occasionally ridiculous. In other words, it feels pretty convincingly like being 22.

Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs at Greenside until August 15