The Problem With Kate Winslet's Dress - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

Hannah Carnegie and Fiona Coughlan are the writer-performers behind The Problem with Kate Winslet’s Dress, one of the sweetest and most charming shows of the festival. As the lights go down, Peter Devlin’s keyboard plays John Williams’ iconic 20th Century Fox theme, immediately transporting us back to the world of cinema that has shaped so much of our lives.

For Carnegie and Coughlan’s two leads, films are more than entertainment. Like so many millennials, their understanding of the world has been filtered through the movies they grew up watching on VHS, on television or during those late-night Saturday RTÉ screenings. Their friendship has been built around films, television and the quotes they have collected along the way. Cinema has given them a shared language through which to understand themselves, each other and the world around them.

But there is also a sadness beneath that love. As adults, they begin to recognise the gap between the lives they were promised by Hollywood and the lives they actually ended up living. The titular Kate Winslet dress becomes a brilliantly funny example of this. Rose might have looked incredible in Titanic, but there is no way that dress is keeping her warm for more than five minutes in the freezing Atlantic. Beneath the joke is a sharper observation about the impossible expectations that films can create. Hollywood gives us beautiful people, perfect romances and dramatic moments of destiny, then leaves us to work out what to do when real life is considerably messier.

The show follows that idea through the different landmarks in our life. From the Disney films that teach us what love and happily-ever-after supposedly look like, to the anticipation of a first kiss, Carnegie and Coughlan explore how cinema can shape our expectations before we have even experienced these things for ourselves. There is something particularly poignant in the transition from seeing yourself as the main character as a child to feeling like an extra in your own life as an adult.

Yet the show never suggests that the answer is to grow up and leave those fantasies behind. Instead, it asks us to reconsider what those films actually gave us. The magic may not have been in believing that life would turn out exactly like a movie. It was in allowing us to imagine that love, adventure, friendship and possibility existed in the first place.

​Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs at The Space UK until August 22nd