We Had Fun - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

There is something deliberately discombobulating about this fascinating world premiere. Oscar and Ela’s friendship is introduced through four years of rapid-fire snapshots, memories and moments compressed into just a few minutes, before we find ourselves in the present as the two friends catch up. Ela has something important to tell Oscar. For a brief moment, it feels as though this might be a confession of romantic feelings. Instead, we discover something far more devastating: after a drunken night out, Oscar and Ela ended up in bed together, and Ela says Oscar raped her.

From there, the play splits into two timelines. In one, Oscar and Ela attempt to reconstruct what happened, picking apart language, messages, consent, intentions and the precise meaning of what was said and done. In the other, we are taken back through the night itself, watching the moments that led to the encounter and the points where their memories and interpretations begin to diverge. It has the feel of Rashomon, refusing to immediately give us a definitive version of events and instead making us sit uncomfortably with competing perspectives. But this isn’t simply a mystery about who is telling the truth. It is about the ways people use language, memory and self-perception to construct a version of events that they can live with.

Jack Mullings and Emmeline Hartley give fascinating performances. Hartley’s Ela is steely but never unsympathetic; even while confronting Oscar, there is a sensitivity to his feelings that makes the imbalance between them increasingly uncomfortable. There is something painfully recognisable in the way Ela approaches the conversation for women in the crowd: she is not only trying to articulate what happened to her, but constantly navigating Oscar’s feelings while doing so. She cushions difficult truths, considers his reactions and remains attentive to his emotional state. It speaks to a wider experience many women will recognise. There is an expectation that even when confronting harm done to them, they must somehow protect a man’s ego, soften the blow and make the conversation emotionally safe for him.

Mullings’ Oscar initially has something of the awkward, lived-in quality of Philip Seymour Hoffman. There is an ordinariness to him, even a vulnerability, that makes his self-image as a fundamentally good guy believable. But as the play evolves, Mullings physically seems to transform. Oscar becomes increasingly grubby and sweaty, his appearance mirroring the deterioration of the version of himself he has been presenting. What begins as defensiveness increasingly becomes entitlement and an inability to confront what his actions say about him. Most brutally, he weaponises Ela’s autism against her, turning something he supposedly understands and cares about into a means of undermining her account of what happened.

The play’s greatest strength is the way it makes the audience experience that uncertainty rather than simply explaining it. We are encouraged to scrutinise every word, every recollection and every contradiction, before the production eventually builds towards the moment when we see what truly happened. By then, the tension in the room is almost unbearable. The question is no longer simply whose version of events we believe, but what we have been willing to excuse, reinterpret or doubt along the way. It is an uncomfortable, intelligent examination of consent, friendship, memory, gender and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and a show that trusts its audience enough to leave us sitting with the discomfort.

Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs until August 31st at Summerhall