Bigfoot Ripped my Dog in Half and I Saw it - Edinburgh Fringe 2026

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It

★★★★★ A riot of theatrical invention with a surprisingly dark political heart.

I am a bona fide Xhloe and Natasha fan, so I arrived at Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It with unusually high expectations and, frankly, I couldn’t wait to see what they had made.

The show follows two women in an Appalachian community whose lives are upended by a devastating flood and the mysterious appearance of Bigfoot. As the community searches for answers, conspiracy, grief and competing versions of the truth begin to collide. It sounds gloriously ridiculous (and it is) but beneath the absurdity lies a surprisingly serious examination of community, disaster, belief and who gets to decide what is true.

The obvious pleasure of the show is its extraordinary theatricality. Xhloe and Natasha are astonishing performers, moving at breakneck speed between characters, physical comedy, puppetry and acrobatics with a precision that makes the whole thing look deceptively easy. The giant Bigfoot is a terrific piece of stagecraft. It is beautifully controlled and enormous fun.

But that is only the beginning of what makes this work exceptional.

The creature becomes less a monster than a story - something around which a community can gather when the official version of events no longer seems sufficient. When the structures that are supposed to protect people fail, other explanations rush into the vacuum. Enter Bigfoot.

We are accustomed to looking at conspiracy thinking from the outside and laughing at its irrationality. Bigfoot is more generous and more troubling: what happens when distrust is not entirely irrational because the institutions being distrusted have actually failed you?

The politics aren't delivered with a highlighter. This is not a simplistic show, and it rewards concentration. At first, it is easy to surrender to the virtuosity, the transformations, the physical comedy, the increasingly wild narrative. But sit with it and the Bigfoot story starts to look like a way of talking about power, neglect, misinformation and who gets to control the story of a disaster.

And there is something else here that makes this production particularly special. It sits within a lineage of exceptional work by artists who have never lost their sense of play, their theatrical innocence or their capacity for wonder but whose work deepens as they themselves and their work matures. The childish pleasure of making a giant monster, transforming into a whole community and telling an outrageous story remains completely intact. What has changed is what they are able to see through that play.

The result is work that can be both exuberant and politically unsettling; technically dazzling and emotionally generous. The theatrical machinery doesn't merely dazzle us. It becomes a way of showing how stories are constructed, shared and believed.

Five stars, then, not simply because Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It is brilliantly made - it is - but because it demonstrates something I value enormously in theatre: the ability to grow up without growing old.

The innocence remains. The questions have become deeper.

Review by Kate Gaul

Image by Jennifer Forward Hayter