The Infant - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025

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 .

​