Set in Budapest at the height of the Cold War, this sharp and playful production follows two operatives - Comrade (Ella Sheree) and Agent (Charlie Turner) - who are tasked with a mission of seduction and espionage: the exchange of state secrets under the guise of intimacy.

From the outset, both characters are knowingly drawn from the archetypes of the era. Agent is the buttoned-up Brit, fretting over matters of class as much as matters of state, while Comrade is the archetypal Russian honey trap, trained in allure but carrying her own vulnerabilities beneath the surface. Overseeing them are their Wires, older agents who attempt, with varying degrees of success, to instill discipline, duty, and the cool detachment their protégés so conspicuously lack.

The show’s great strength lies in how it reframes the familiar tropes of spycraft through the lens of romance. The comedy of espionage is filtered through the rhythms of dating: clandestine exchanges over cafés and park benches become first encounters, awkward in their formality yet charged with possibility. As the pair graduate to bedrooms, their physical entanglement mirrors the deepening complications of emotional connection. In the process, seduction gives way to genuine affection, and the game of intelligence sharing collapses into a confession booth of secrets with every classified scrap willingly handed over in the name of love. When their mutual betrayals leave them pursued by the very organisations that trained them, the central dilemma crystallises: where does loyalty lie, with flag or with heart? 

The show unfolds in distinct segments of the seduction with each scene punctuated by blackouts that, in a delightful surprise for a fringe production, drew applause every time. Written by Alex Macfarlane and Charlie Turner, the piece knowingly nods to the shadowy world of John le Carré, George Smiley, The Circus, and the weary tradecraft of Cold War duplicity but does so with a wry, comic eye. Rather than mire itself in grey trench coats and bureaucratic gloom, the writing revels in absurdity, highlighting the thin line between espionage and intimacy, deception and desire. This is a piece that understands its source material, pokes fun at it, and yet finds real emotional weight in the absurd stakes of Cold War romance.

Performance is everything in a play so rooted in chemistry, and both leads deliver superbly. Sheree brings Russian wit, warmth, and a subversive edge to Comrade, turning what could have been a cliché into a character of depth. Turner balances dry humour with vulnerability, his Agent’s stiff-upper-lip exterior cracking in a way that is both hilarious and oddly touching. Together, their interplay has the audience leaning in and rooting for them even as their choices grow more reckless.

Lee Hutchison

4.5/5

This performance was watched on the final day of the run

Caroline Dunn steps into the role of Sister Prudence with both humour and heartbreaking depth. On the surface, Prudence is a young nun, bound in habit - though the glittering, sequined dress beneath hints at a hidden, dazzling self, yearning to break free. The habit becomes more than costume; it is a cloak of Catholicism, a metaphor for all that has been repressed and concealed.

Prudence’s story is one of thwarted potential. Targeted at a young age and pushed toward religious devotion, she sacrifices her dreams of becoming a designer, an actor or an artist. Her queerness, supressed but never quite denied, is woven into the subtext of her faith as perhaps even the reason she fled into it. It is no accident that she is a nun who accepts evolution, or one who quietly admits that church ritual feels dull. She is a believer of sorts, but a restless, questioning one.

Dunn infuses Prudence with remarkable warmth and humanity. You find yourself silently urging her to escape, to claim her identity, to step into the world as her true, gay self. What begins in broad comedy with sharp wit gradually deepens into something more profound. The play grows darker, more contemplative, as Prudence confronts the voices in her head. These voices are not from God but internal, echoing years of shame, repression, and self-doubt. Battling between faith and authenticity, between imposed identity and self-liberation.

The comedy unfolds into a poignant portrait of a woman torn between the church’s quiet confines and the brilliant, queer self that longs to shine through. Dunn’s performance makes Prudence not just a character but a mirror to many queer people reflecting the painful cost of hiding, and the courage it takes to resist the voices that tell you to stay cloaked.

Lee Hutchison

4/5
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This performance was watched on the final day of the run

An Ode to the Casting Director has quickly become one of the buzziest shows of the fringe, a word-of-mouth success with a run of sold-out performances.

Written and performed by Sophie Fisher, the show is rooted in her real-life experience as a model, actor, and filmmaker. Fisher has spent years navigating both sides of the camera and auditioning for jobs, working behind the lens, and collecting an almost unbelievable archive of stories from the world of casting. What she does so brilliantly here is take those humiliations, absurdities, and small triumphs of a “jobbing actor’s” life and transform them into a semi-autobiographical debut that is both biting and hilarious.

From the moment she strips down to a bikini, Fisher sets the tone with a “reveal all” that is at once literal and metaphorical. The stage design with a chaise longue that slips between audition room and therapist’s couch—underscores the blurred line between performance and confession. However, in the space at times, sightlines obscure the action on the chaise longue. The audience, crammed into the sold-out venue, feels less like a passive crowd and more like a panel of casting directors watching her cycle through a dizzying repertoire: a mustard advert, meal kit delivery spiel, toe-sucking gag, crisp-stuffing experience, guttural Viking scream, and bridal-wear pantomime. 

One of Fisher’s sharpest observations lies in the absurd demands placed on actors to have an endless list of “extra skills.” You can never say no and you claim martial arts mastery, drumming proficiency, or the ability to belt out a ballad even if you’ve barely touched the skill. Fisher skewers this with knowing wit, but also reframes it as a metaphor for life: the pressure to always say yes, to bend ourselves into roles we were never meant to play, just to keep moving forward.

Yet the show doesn’t stop at professional anecdotes. Fisher threads in her personal history and relationships with a self-obsessed boyfriend and parents who dismiss her artistic ambitions. These stories deepen the play’s emotional resonance, grounding the comedy in something bruised and real. At its core, An Ode to the Casting Director isn’t just about auditions gone wrong but it’s about the way a relentless cycle of performance, rejection, and re-invention can make us lose sight of who we really are, and what we actually need.

What makes the piece sing is Fisher’s writing and performance: sharp without being self-indulgent, generous in how she animates the side characters who populate her world, and alive with the sort of detail that could only come from lived experience. With Fisher’s mix of cringe-comedy, tragicomedy it’s not hard to imagine the concept thriving as a television adaptation. 

Lee Hutchison

4.5/5

An Ode To The Casting Director 
Venue:  The Penny at Gilded Balloon Patter House
​​Dates: August 24-25
Time: 1140
Tickets:  an-ode-to-the-casting-director

The Infant is a bold and surprising fusion of morality play, fantasy, and speculative science fiction. What begins with the simple premise of a mother in 1974 Arkansas accused of murdering her infant child unfolds into a time-bending moral labyrinth, forcing its audience to confront uncomfortable questions about faith, choice, and the burden of foresight.

The play opens with Caroline (Izzy How), a devout Christian, sat before police officer Billie (Isolde Jane). Assisting in the investigation is June (Kate Wells), a psychic interrogator whose visions are used to uncover the truth behind crimes. What seems like a familiar Southern Gothic interrogation quickly fractures into something stranger and more unsettling when June uncovers that Caroline possesses an extraordinary and dangerous gift of her own: the ability to see into the future. From that revelation, the play pivots into an intricate meditation on destiny, morality, and the unbearable weight of knowledge.

Montague Austin’s writing and direction grapple with the uncomfortable intersections of good and evil, refusing to draw easy lines between the two. At the heart of the play lies a conundrum akin to the infamous “evil baby Hitler” thought experiment: if you knew a child would grow to bring suffering, would preventing that future be murder, or salvation? This question pulses throughout the narrative, infused with biblical resonance - the shadow of Abraham’s murder of his son Isaac looming as Caroline wrestles with her visions. By transposing these timeless moral quandaries into a Southern Gothic interrogation room, Austin reframes age-old theological and philosophical dilemmas in a way that feels immediate and haunting.

The performances ground the play’s speculative elements in visceral human experience. Izzy How brings Caroline’s torment to life with a quiet intensity, capturing both the rigidity of her religious faith and the terror of her prophetic visions. Wells’s June exudes a quiet unease as she navigates the burden of her psychic power, while Isolde Jane lends Billie a sharp-edged pragmatism with a perfect Southern drawl that keeps the play rooted in a believable reality. Together, the trio deliver a deeply atmospheric portrait of a society both ordinary and uncanny. Robert (Oli May), Caroline’s son, is a figure not marked by hellfire or biblical damnation, but by the maddening and more corrosive demons of the self

The Southern Gothic grunge aesthetic that shifts between the 1970s and the 1990s and gives the production a raw and textured feel. Lighting and spotlights are used with well, transforming sparse settings into spaces of intimacy and dread. The police interrogation room becomes a crucible for ethical debate, while the kitchen of the future becomes a space where personal faith collides with devastating foresight. These stark visual choices heighten the claustrophobia of the moral questions being wrestled with.

Lee Hutchison

4/5

The show was watched on the last day of the fringe festival .

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One of my most anticipated productions of this year’s Fringe marks the return of Claudia Osborne to Edinburgh. After her stand out performance in last year’s highlight Bachelor Girls, Osborne now takes on the dual role of co-writer (alongside Jude Burrows) and director, delivering a dystopian story that feels at once terrifyingly unreal and disturbingly close to home

Set in an alternate present where a totalitarian regime has criminalised homosexuality, Osborne and Burrows’ script refuses to deal in abstraction. Instead, it brings us into the cramped, claustrophobic world of three people simply trying to live and love as honestly as they can. Ailith (Lizzie Kilbride), her  “husband” Ethan (Sam Bain), and Ethan’s lover Gabriel (Burrows) share a fragile sanctuary together, holding tight to their secret happiness. But Ailith’s job as a defence attorney places her under the scrutiny of the very system they are hiding from, and the threat of exposure looms with suffocating intensity.

The power of the piece lies in how it interrogates the quiet, everyday intimacy of queer love under oppression. How much of a relationship can you truly have when you cannot share a bed without fear, when a glass of wine together in public could turn into an act of betrayal if overheard by the wrong person? This setting and staging makes us feel and witness this constant precariousness in every moment - the stolen glance, the silence when someone enters the room, the sweat that clings to the actors’ skin. Kilbride, Bain, and Burrows all deliver performances of sorrow and power, every flicker of doubt and every burst of longing magnified by the production’s taut intimacy.

But the play’s resonance goes further than its fictional premise. What Down to the Felt lays bare is how fragile progress can be, how easily rights and freedoms can be stripped away. Though framed as an imagined dystopia, it is impossible to ignore the parallels with our present moment, where LGBTQI+ communities across the world are facing fresh waves of hostility, scapegoating, and legislative attack.  Osborne and Burrows force us to consider how close this “alternative future” really is, and what it means to love truthfully in a climate that punishes honesty. What emerges is a piece of theatre that is as emotionally devastating as it is politically urgent. 

Lee Hutchison

4/5
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​This show was watched on the last day of the festival.