Fringe theatre reviews: Big Stuff | Gameplay | Long Way Home | Saving Britney | In The Cold Light | Operation Blank

THEATRE

Big Stuff ★★★★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 30 August

Canadian comedy-improv duo Second City - husband and wife Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus - make their Fringe debut with a show which is part comedy, part storytelling, part improv, and all heart. I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever lost a parent, cleared a family home, or just knows what it’s like to hold on to a box of useless things you can’t bring yourself to throw away.

The duo draw on their own experience as custodians of “a bunch of worthless junk”, whether self-accumulated or left to them by parents and grandparents. Baram likes to throw things away, while Snieckus keeps everything, from a bag of her mother’s old lipsticks to the hair of their now-departed dog in a zip-lock bag, and this leads to some good-humoured friction. She admits to owning seven toasters, despite no longer eating bread.

But, of course, this isn’t just about stuff, it’s about the way objects become “gateways to memories”: Snieckus’ grandmother’s crochet hook, Baram’s mother’s tapestries, the baseball cap Baram gave Snieckus the day they met. Many of these objects are part of their set - which also includes several toasters.

Audience members are invited to share stories of their own, and they are received warmly and generously. The scripted sections are wickedly fast and laugh-out-loud funny, reflecting both their considerable experience as improvisers and their 16 years of marriage.

But they can be poignant just as quickly, as they discuss their last months with Snieckus’ father Harvey, a larger than life Lithuanian chemistry professor. This is big stuff, in every sense, and this generous show can hold grief as effectively as laughter.

The show has already toured Canada and was selling out the RoxyBoxy within the first few days of the Fringe. Get a ticket - if you can. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Gameplay ★★★★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 31 August

Gameplay insists on access first. Sam Rees begins the show – a collaboration with sound artist AJ Turner – by describing what he is wearing, what is around him and what will happen over the next hour. “This room is not neutral,” he reads from a script in a tailcoat and tie. Everyone receives and interprets information differently, and the theatre tends to reject this fact in its focus on visual spectacle, character and plot.

Gameplay inverts the theatrical form, taking us across several timelines towards the end of the world. An existential grief fuels the story and music of the show. Rees speaks about living on “borrowed time” and his and Turner’s shared sense that a business-as-usual approach to life is not only faltering, but on the brink of collapse as crises rage around us. Rees weaves this reflexivity with stories about a Soviet Naval officer, former Daily Mail critic Quentin Letts, and us, after we leave the theatre.

The writing is crisp and brought to life by Turner’s skill on a sound deck. At one point in the show, they play the violin to such a delicious point that Rees’ words become obsolete. It is in these moments that Gameplay feels most expansive, as the room fills with something we cannot quite locate and imagination does the rest. The show does an excellent job proving how much can be conjured without the visual cues theatre usually relies upon.

There is something admirable about Gameplay’s commitment to access as part of its form, and Rees is a compelling guide through its sometimes unsettling thought experiments. Yet having established such a rich relationship between sound, imagination and access, the show could have pushed its experiment further – surrendering fully to the soundscape, perhaps in a theatre plunged into darkness, or inviting the audience to actively shape the experience and its meaning. Mika Morava

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THEATRE

Long Way Home ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 31 August

Layla Warren was born in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, a city of bombs and sirens where children learned quickly how to stay safe. This show, directed by Sepy Baghaei, is a whistle-stop journey through her life to date, from Tehran to London to the USA, back to London as a teenage runaway, then to LA, where she managed to land a dream job in television.

Running through all this is her tricky relationship with her country. As a young woman she wanted freedom from traditional values, yet her love for Iran persists. Now, in the wake of Trump’s deportation programme, and when the country is being bombed once again, she asks: “Where would home be, if there was no war?”

Warren is a dynamic performer who has many stories to tell. In fact, there are so many in this show that sometimes the detail gets in the way of the broader themes. It’s all interesting, of course, but if one can resist the temptation to include everything, it might produce a piece of work which is even more impactful. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Saving Britney ★★★

Underbelly George Square (Venue 300) until 30 August

Britney Spears superfan Jean has calculated 172 connections (so far) between her life and that of her pop idol - sharing a birthday, a name (Jean is Spears’ middle name) and other spurious coincidences which feed into her escapist attachment to the former Mouseketeer-turned-blockbusting pop phenomenon.

Their stories are entwined throughout the show. Performer (and co-writer) Shereen Roushbaiani plays Jean as an endlessly enthusiastic Spears cheerleader down the years, while recounting key landmarks in Britney’s rollercoaster career into a plastic microphone. There are light comic touches, such as laughing affectionately at old technology “from the 1900s”. But there are darker parallels too: both tangle with overbearing fathers, heads are shaved because of illness, Jean’s parents split as Britney and Justin Timberlake call it quits.

Her love of Britney drowns out the drama of her childhood then helps her understand her adolescence. Hit Me Baby One More Time was a visceral epiphany beyond all reason, but Spears’ second album taught her about feminism and the contrived kiss with Madonna at the MTV Music Awards was a license to explore her own sexuality. Saving Britney presents in bright bubblegum fashion with replicas of some of Spears’ iconic costumes hanging on a rail and the scenery plastered with her wholesome image. But this is a sincere love letter to the life-saving properties of pop. Fiona Shepherd

THEATRE

In the Cold Light ★★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 29 August

Playwright and director George Grant won awards at the Fringe on 2025 for his debut play Operation Blank, and returns this year with a knottier piece about grief and male friendship. Grant plays Michael, a journalist obsessed with physicist and mountaineer Arthur Johnson and his friendship with an illiterate crofter from the Isle of Mull, Andrew MacLeod.

Determined to prove there is more to the relationship than a shared love of hiking and stamp-collecting, he conducts interviews by video call (supporting actors Illona Linthwaite and Graham Kellas are particularly strong). But Michael himself has recently lost a friend, and his editor (Clare Harbin) is more interested in how he is coping than in anything his investigations might discover.

The play is inventive and interesting, and the Johnson/MacLeod storyline is a genuinely compelling yarn, spooled out a bit at a time as more information is revealed. However, it’s hampered by awkwardness in the direction, and by the sense that it is pulling two ways: the Johnson/MacLeod story takes most of the air-time, but the central question of the play is about Michael himself and a friendship which ended before the play began. Susan Mansfield

THEATRE

Operation Blank ★★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 29 August

A frenetic turn from writer-performer George Grant drives this enormously technically adept apocalyptic comedy. Actually, performances would be more accurate as Grant plays a British Government junior minister who is desperately trying to jolt the powers-that-be into action after an atomic bomb is dropped on Copenhagen. However, Grant also plays all the government ministers — and assorted interested parties — in the Microsoft Teams call as his laptop screen is projected behind him. This is impeccably timed stuff that, remarkably, is carried off without any technical glitches (that aren’t entirely intentional). It’s a little frustrating that Grant’s script isn’t quite as funny as it should be — it’s rather telling that the funniest character is the venerable Sir Ian, who can’t figure out how to turn his mic on and has no lines. Also, there’s far too much of an inexplicable talking potato that adds an unwelcome touch of whimsy to what should be a genuinely funny political satire. Grant’s other characters are well, and broadly, drawn though. The attention to detail — and pace — smooth over any rough patches in the script (Grant’s newspaper front page mock-ups are well done) and there is, ultimately, something like a serious point to all this that actually (sort of) explains that annoying potato. Rory Ford

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