Xhloe & Natasha's Trilogy - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025

Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice return to the Edinburgh Fringe this month with an ambitious feat: performing their entire Natasha & Xhloe trilogy with And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, What If They Ate the Baby?, and A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First across the festival. Each show stands alone, yet together they form a surreal journey through the archetypes of Americana, from the swagger of the cowboy to the perfect poise of the 1950s housewife, and finally to the earnest salute of the Boy Scout.

It’s a trilogy with serious Fringe pedigree. And Then the Rodeo Burned Down made their name in Edinburgh, winning the 2022 Fringe First Award. What If They Ate the Baby? repeated that success in 2023 with its own Fringe First win, praised for its darkly comic dismantling of suburban myth. Last year, A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God completed the hat-trick, earning yet another Fringe First for its poignant, playful skewering of patriotism and boyhood.

The trilogy begins with And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, a minimalist, absurdist western in which the cowboy archetype is reduced to its barest gestures with lasso twirls, swaggering postures. This isn’t a celebration of the cowboy but a slow burn dismantling of the myth, exposing how little substance lies beneath the Stetson once you strip away the hero worship. In this opening act of their Americana dissection, Roland and Rice show that the cowboy dream is a set of repeated motions—comforting, but empty.

If Rodeo sets the stage, What If They Ate the Baby? drags us inside the post-war home. The duo transform into pristine, pastel-clad housewives from a mid-century commercial, all fixed smiles and politeness. Yet the surface is fragile cracking into eerie repetition, spilt green pasta, and bursts of unsettling physicality. This world of perfect lawns and spotless kitchens becomes claustrophobic, the politeness suffocating. It’s a Stepford-esque nightmare in which conformity and repression swirl together, suggesting that the American Dream has always been as much about containment as aspiration.

The final chapter, A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God, takes us to the 1960s, where two Boy Scouts - Ace and Grasshopper play war games in the shadow of the Vietnam conflict. They puff up with imagined heroics, write to their Commander-in-Chief as if he were a benevolent father, and hum Beatles tunes between bouts of military fantasy. But the innocence is haunted; patriotism turns into indoctrination, and the audience is left watching boyhood dissolve into a uniformed destiny. By the end, the laughter is tinged with something much heavier and the recognition that myths of national glory demand their sacrifices.

Across the trilogy, Natasha & Xhloe are not just telling stories; they’re dismantling cultural furniture. Their Americana is not romanticised, but fractured and queerly reimagined. They take three of the most enduring American archetypes with the cowboy, the housewife, the Boy Scout and place them under a funhouse mirror until the distortions reveal the truth. The plays lean on clowning and stripped-back staging, with physical precision replacing spectacle, making the myths feel even more hollow when their gestures repeat into absurdity.

We are witness the iconic American imagery but we are also reminded to notice who’s missing from the picture, whose desires had to be hidden, and what these ideals demanded in return. In reframing the American Dream through their own queer, surreal lens, Natasha & Xhloe give us a portrait of a nation’s stories not as monuments, but as malleable clay that is ready to be reshaped, laughed at, and finally, released.

And Then The Rodeo Burned Down - 4/5
What If They Ate The Baby - 5/5
A Letter To Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First - 4.5/5