The Wedding Guest - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

There is something wonderfully awkward about The Wedding Date from writers Orla Tagg and Sera Mustafa, a two-hander that places Iris and Selena at a school friend’s wedding, surrounded by the kind of school friends you thought you had left behind and you find yourself wondering why, exactly, you were invited. The audience become wedding guests as the pair move through the reception, and beneath the small talk, drinks and familiar faces, old secrets begin to surface. 

Orla Tagg’s Iris and Kate Barrington’s Selena have an immediately fascinating dynamic. They are best friends, but not quite in the way the title might suggest. They seem close, yet there is a strange distance between them, as though their friendship is being maintained more through muscle memory than genuine intimacy. Their almost matching red outfits are also feel quietly revealing: surely two women who are as close as Iris and Selena believe they are would have made sure not to turn up dressed almost identically. It captures something painfully recognisable about adulthood: the people who once knew everything about you can gradually become people you struggle to find time for. The diaries fill up, life moves on, and suddenly maintaining a friendship becomes something you have to actively schedule.

That awkwardness becomes increasingly charged when Iris spots Jack, a former school crush, and sees the wedding as an opportunity to reignite something. But when it emerges that Selena slept with him years earlier, the carefully maintained friendship begins to crack. The jealousy that follows feels almost deliberately adolescent. Iris has a real fire in her belly, while Selena’s more nonchalant attitude only seems to make things worse. Their argument has the uncomfortable energy of two adults suddenly reverting to the teenagers they once were, dragging old rivalries and insecurities back into the present.

It is a shame, then, that The Wedding Date only lasts around 30 minutes despite being billed at 50. I was genuinely surprised when it ended, even if the dramatic note it lands on works. The frustration comes from just how much I was enjoying watching these two women circle each other. Tagg and Mustafa make the relationship compelling precisely because there is so much left unsaid, and there feels to be considerably more story buried beneath their history.

There is clearly something worth exploring here about female friendship, growing apart, jealousy and the strange ways adulthood can leave us carrying teenage versions of ourselves. The Wedding Date finds that tension effectively, but just as it starts to really dig into it, the lights go down. If there were a second part at next year’s Fringe, I would absolutely be there. More than anything, I left wishing the this wedding party had lasted a little longer.

Lee Hutchison


Runs at Greenside George Street until August 29th