Parasocial Activity - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

After Briony Martha’s sensational five-star performance in last year’s Do Astronauts Masturbate in Space?, Parasocial Activity was always going to be one of the Fringe’s most anticipated shows. Written and performed by Martha, with Megan Brewer directing, it more than delivers, becoming a funny, unsettling and increasingly disturbing exploration of loneliness, obsession and the dangerous space between fandom and reality.

Martha plays Jenny McGuire, a young woman who has returned to Glasgow after failing to become the actor she imagined she would be in London. Dressed in bright pink trousers and a Hello Kitty top, Jenny initially appears vulnerable and lost. Then a chance encounter with James McAvoy in a Sauchiehall Street Costa Coffee leads to two tickets for his sold-out show and, eventually, Jenny believing she has developed a relationship with the actor.

What follows is where Parasocial Activity really gets under your skin. The lines between fantasy and reality become increasingly blurred as Jenny's fascination develops into something far more consuming. Does McAvoy really want her to kill his wife and take her place, or are we experiencing a fantasy constructed by someone desperately looking for connection? The play keeps us guessing, and that uncertainty is part of its brilliance.

The show uses humour to make those darker themes land even harder. Martha finds plenty of comedy in Jenny’s awkwardness, fandom and increasingly bizarre behaviour, allowing the audience to laugh before gradually making us question exactly what it is we are laughing at. The humour becomes a way of drawing us into Jenny’s world before the unease starts to take over.

Martha is sensational. There is an intensity running through her entire performance, particularly in her eyes, as Jenny moves from vulnerability and humour into jealousy and mania. She makes Jenny both deeply sympathetic and increasingly frightening, never reducing her to a simple caricature of an obsessed fan. Instead, we understand how loneliness, fandom and the desire to be seen can become dangerously intertwined.

The staging is wonderfully inventive too. Brewer uses standing microphones to allow Martha to conjure Jenny's family, McAvoy and the other people surrounding her, creating an entire world around a single performer. It is simple but incredibly effective, particularly as that world becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from Jenny's imagination.

Martha has announced herself yet again as an equally exciting writer and performer, while Brewer's direction keeps the production tight, inventive and increasingly unsettling. Parasocial Activity is funny, uncomfortable, unpredictable and brilliantly performed and it gets right inside the mind of someone losing their grip on reality.

Lee Hutchison

5/5

Parasocial Activity at The Gilded Balloon, Patter House every day but Monday at 17:40pm