Fringe theatre reviews: Amnesia | To Do Lists | Sitting (In Silence) | Tap Out! (or I’ll hit you again) | LuluLand | An Evening with Gerald Lloyd-Davies

THEATRE

Amnesia ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 31 August

Kimberley Hart-Simpson, best known as Nicky Wheatley in Coronation Street, writes and performs this one-woman show about a dementia carer in Rhyl, the town where she grew up. Directed by Theatr Clwyd’s Kate Wasserberg, it represents Wales in the Pleasance Edinburgh’s National Partnerships Programme to champion new theatre makers.

Kelly is just back from five days in Ibiza with her gay best friend, Amrit. Throwing down her suitcase, she pulls on her uniform for the care home in which they both work: 16 residents in a former B&B, “Fawlty Towers meets The Shining”. But they’re good at it: good with Astrid, an ex-cop, Lennie, a former roofer and Edna, a biting, opera-loving diva.

Limbering up for a dance routine with Amrit for Edna’s 85th birthday, she stumbles across a resignation letter. Amrit is leaving, he just hadn’t got round to telling her. His departure feels like betrayal, and awakens the trauma of her father’s leaving when she was 15. Amrit says he feels like an eagle trapped in a budgie’s cage, but Kelly is the budgie, “cheap, dependable, loyal.” Now 37, she’s never thought of spreading her wings.

Hart-Simpson has written a complex, fully rounded character. While she plays Kelly’s loudness and coarseness, sometimes at the expense of greater nuance, her writing reveals it. She is a clear-eyed observer of her small town, and is not above taking action if the need arises.

“They never make shows about happy people in seaside towns unless they get out,” she says. And Rhyl is beautifully evoked here, with its aquarium (demolished) and Fun Fair (closed down), a place of ordinary, working-class lives. This is a play about the people who don’t get out, who do vital work like caring for those with dementia, and are left with the lingering notion that their lives are somehow not enough. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

To Do Lists ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 31 August

Amy Lever begins her one-person play with a to-do list: 1. Turn life around; 2. Learn to stop relying on to-do lists. An emerging playwright who brought her play Lost Girl to the Fringe in 2024, Lever delves into her own life to write this show, developed with support from The Horsfall, a creative engagement space and young people’s mental health charity in Manchester.

The shock of failing to get into her local grammar school changes everything for Lever. Determined never to fail again, she sets her sights on the best grades and a place at Cambridge, where her father and brother both went, and begins to make to-do lists obsessively, breaking down every task into its component parts.

Once at Cambridge, the lists continue. There’s a beautifully funny moment when a budding relationship with posh boy Nathaniel ends when he trips over her giant whiteboard full of lists. She does well, and wins a playwriting prize, but a bereavement forces a change of perspective. What if productivity isn’t everything? Is it possible she has been making lists instead of living?

Directed by Giulia Grillo, To Do Lists is a lively story, well told, with plenty of humour. Creative captioning by Emily Bold adds a playful extra layer to the storytelling, as does Millie Loveday Inglis’ charming set of giant lists and post-it notes.

It would be even stronger, dramatically, if we were allowed to dwell a little longer with the moment of crisis, with what happened when the messy incompleteness of life was revealed and the lists suddenly felt worthless. Instead, Lever pushes on to tell us about another success. However, the show remains an important reminder of the pressures many young people labour under, and a cautionary tale for list-makers everywhere. Susan Mansfield

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THEATRE

Sitting (In Silence) ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

The soothing twitter of birdsong and the sonorous toll of a gong are the only sounds supposed to be heard on Gabby’s ten day silent meditation retreat. But it’s not long before that silence is shattered by her garrulous, gatecrashing dad. He is initially a clownish presence who prefers the alternative therapy of “laughter-based diplomacy”.

Although Gabby is ostensibly recovering from losing her job after a violent incident, father and daughter have other issues to work through, individually and together. He is an alcoholic, prone to romanticizing the past. His view that “some people are just born heavy hearted” doesn’t cut it with his daughter who had to bear her unfair share of looking out for her dad as a child. But he’s here now and, for all their generational differences of opinion and perspective, the affection between parent and child is palpable, as conveyed by the charismatic Patrick O’Donnell and writer Kitty Falcon, who lost her father to suicide when she was 18.

Sitting (In Silence) is as quiet, understated and, it has to be said, uneventful as a retreat should be but, beyond the stage, actions speak louder than words, as Terracotta Productions partner with Worthing-based charity Dad La Soul who work to tackle social isolation for fathers. Fiona Shepherd

THEATRE

Tap Out! (or I’ll hit you again) ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 31 August

Some people are calling him Batman: he’s a masked vigilante who’s gone viral on socials, and who seems to appear from nowhere to slog it out with wrongdoers in the streets. That’s until those wrongdoers start being homeless guys who look at him in the wrong way, or men who huff at him in slow-moving Post Office queues. And until he starts to hunt them down just for the pleasure of battering them.

There are inevitable parallels with Fight Club in writer/director Conor Dye’s powerful and physical solo show, and the desperation to use violence as a way of simply feeling something unites the two works, as does a sense of pitch-black humour. But Dye’s conflicted protagonist is very much a twentysomething from 2026, and his attempts to assert his masculinity are clearly informed by more contemporary debates, even if those are not specifically namechecked in the writer’s punchy script.

Matt Ackerman is a volatile physical presence as Dye’s unnamed protagonist, though he seems more at home in the character’s tenderer exchanges with girlfriends and long-suffering mates than in spitting fury against the wider world, and Dye opens up a few more narrative threads than he convincingly ties up at the end. But this is a memorable, challenging show all the same, and one that raises compelling questions about how we define ourselves in relation to those around us. David Kettle

THEATRE

LuluLand ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 31 August

Filling out behavioural checklists, feeling apprehensive about making schoolfriends, seeming to possess her own idiosyncratic concept of time that’s entirely different from other people’s: Lucy is sick of being different from everyone else. She dreams of living in a place where she isn’t seen as “weird” - and she seems to have her prayers answered when she’s whisked away by friendly aliens to somewhere everyone is just like her. But is the unbending conformity she discovers really what she wants?

Lucy Ann Morrison’s touching, lo-fi musical finds a whimsical but effective way of speaking about neurodivergence, and about acknowledging your hopes and desires even if your brain might be wired in a different way from many people’s. Morrison is a fine performer too, with a beautifully crystalline voice and some nimble guitar picking in her simple but clearly heartfelt songs, and she’s backed up by three strong supporting actor/singers too. LuluLand might be quite naive, even childlike in its execution, and it would make indeed a strong offering for kids, neurodivergent or not. But its underlying message of embracing life and hope - and of listening to the voices of everyone, no matter how different they might seem - is a valuable one for all ages. David Kettle

THEATRE

An Evening with Gerald Lloyd-Davies ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

Gerald’s the kind of charming theatrical gentleman of a certain age that you can often find in the smaller Fringe venues – perhaps a hotel conference room – regaling audiences of a similar age but less starry credentials. Only here he’s played by a her: Laurie Stevens who, with a simple bald cap concealing her hair, becomes this dapper man with a delicate demeanour telling tales across the decades after hitting it big in The Mousetrap.

Should she be taking on another’s role? And, in today’s world, should he? It’s a question that’s touched on but underexplored in favour of a classic set-up of one man’s life on the stage, name dropping those he’s encountered along the way.

Interspersed with songs (“there’s no business like show business”), haunted by his lost love Jaqueline, Gerald moves with ease into the 21st century. Soon he’s doing a butter commercial, working with a problematic avant-garde Polish company and talking to a tennis ball on a stick. A tighter script in which the decisions he made, as a Welshman, to give up his accent and make his identity malleable could add more focus, but its freewheeling nature adds to the authenticity. You may well be Googling if Gerald is real by the end and hoping he might be. Sally Stott

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