Laughing Out Lonely - Edinburgh Fringe 2026

Laughing Out Lonely

★★★★ Haunting, unsettling and utterly compelling, with a voice you simply cannot fault.

This is not opera as we know it and that is precisely the point. Laughing Out Lonely is produced by Danish contemporary opera company OPE-N, with Matilde Böcher and Asger Kudahl creating the music, Louise Beck directing, and Josefine Else Larsen responsible for the striking set design. It is a distinctly collaborative production, bringing together opera, electronic music, performance and visual art to create something that feels far removed from opera as we traditionally know it.

Laughing Out Lonely is a solo performance exploring loneliness, connection and identity in the digital age. Drawing on the raw language of social media, it creates a strange and fragmented world where online voices, desires and anxieties collide. At its centre, an extraordinary countertenor, Morten Grove Frandsen, inhabits a shifting cast of characters, moving between vulnerability, absurdity, darkness and humour. Through live electronic sound, imaginative design and a unique physical performance, the work asks what it means to seek connection when we are more digitally connected, and perhaps more isolated, than ever. A well-worn path perhaps but I found the approach here refreshing, especially using opera.

Otherworldly, unsettling and at times surprisingly funny, this inventive solo work plunges us into the strange, fractured landscape of digital loneliness. Rather than imposing traditional operatic form on its subject, creators Matilde Böcher and Asger Kudahl, with director Louise Beck, respond to it with an equally fractured and imaginative theatrical language. This informs the entire experience.

At the centre is Danish countertenor Morten Grove Frandsen, whose extraordinary voice is impossible to fault. Beautiful, haunting and astonishingly versatile, he moves through a shifting collection of voices, characters and online identities with remarkable physical and vocal precision.

The production design is equally impressive - resonant, imaginative and at times genuinely uncanny. Sound, light, movement and space combine to create a world that feels both alien and uncomfortably familiar. We encounter a room filled with bright yellow storage boxes, individual lights surrounded by an array of speakers in an otherwise darkened space. The effect is peaceful. beautiful, strange and quietly disorienting — part archive, part warehouse, part digital landscape. The glowing boxes create a vivid visual rhythm while the speakers surround us with the fractured voices and sounds of the work. It is a deceptively simple design that becomes increasingly haunting as the performance unfolds.

It is jagged, occasionally confronting and wonderfully weird, but there are moments of unexpected humour amid the darkness. Most importantly, the work feels like a welcome creative response to its subject: a form searching for an appropriate language to explore what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I loved it.

Review by Kate Gaul