Mayflies - Edinburgh Fringe 2026

MAYFLIES

★★★★★ A gorgeous coming-of-age story that makes the journey, the warehouse and the audience’s individual perspective part of the theatre: flawed, ambitious and utterly Fringe.

There are some shows where the journey to the theatre is part of the experience. Mayflies, Grid Iron’s site-specific adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s acclaimed novel, is one of them.

You have to make your way out to Brown’s of Leith, into the rear warehouse of what was once the George Brown & Sons Engineering Works. It is not a casual central-Fringe drop-in. You have to commit to getting there  and I think that is smart. The audience has a little skin in the game before the performance has even begun.

And then the warehouse gets transformed.

Adapted and directed by Ben Harrison, with dramaturgy by playwright Douglas Maxwell, Mayflies tells the story of Tully and Noodles, two friends whose lives are shaped by the music, politics and exuberance of 1980s youth. In 1986, they head to Manchester for a legendary weekend of music and hedonism. Thirty years later, their friendship is confronted with mortality when Tully is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

O’Hagan’s novel is a coming-of-age story, but also a story about what happens when the young people we once were meet the adults we have become. It is about friendship, memory, music, grief and the peculiar permanence of certain moments in our lives.

One line from the novel seems to hold the whole thing:

“They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.”

That is the great pleasure of Mayflies. It understands that youth isn't simply a period of ignorance waiting to be corrected by experience. There are things we feel with extraordinary clarity at eighteen that adulthood can obscure: the intensity of friendship, the absolute importance of music, the conviction that the world might still be changed.

A warehouse becomes Manchester: the production's greatest achievement is perhaps the simplest: it makes you believe that this warehouse is exactly where Mayflies should be happening.

Jen McGinley's set and costume design, Lewis den Hertog's video design, Simon Wilkinson's lighting and David Paul Jones's soundtrack work together to turn the industrial space into a memory of Manchester's music culture. The architecture isn't hidden or neutralised. It is embraced. Concrete, brick, industrial structures and the vastness of the warehouse become part of the production's visual and emotional landscape.

There is a terrific physicality to the transformation. Music and projections create the exhilaration of the Manchester weekend, while the building itself carries a history of labour and industry that sits beautifully beneath the story of young people dreaming of somewhere else.

And, crucially, everyone sees a different show.

The audience configuration means that your sightline, proximity to the actors and relationship to the space varies according to where you are sitting. I loved this. It is one of the things that site-specific theatre can do brilliantly: there isn't necessarily one perfect, authorised image of the production. Your experience is partly constructed by where you happen to be. That feels particularly appropriate for Mayflies, a story fundamentally concerned with memory. We don't all remember the same event in the same way. Why should we see it in the same way either?

The acting is terrific. Jude Bain as Younger Tully and Kieran Devine as Younger Noodles have the energy, recklessness and chemistry required to make us believe that this friendship could define two lives. Their youthful exuberance is infectious without becoming sentimental.

As the older Tully and Noodles, Graham Mackay-Bruce and Matthew Pidgeon have the harder task of making thirty years of friendship feel present in the room. They are particularly good at the things that aren't said like the accumulated knowledge, irritation, affection and shorthand of people who have known one another for most of their adult lives. The ensemble: Paul McCole, Lucianne McEvoy, John McGeachie and Carmen Pieraccini, shifts between characters and worlds with real generosity and precision.

There are some initial audibility issues. The combination of the warehouse acoustics, Scottish accents and amplification takes a little time for the ear to adjust to. Once it does, the problem largely recedes, but it is one of the challenges of putting a production of this scale into an industrial space.

The audience is looked after. For all the ambition of the production, the audience experience is surprisingly well considered. The operational infrastructure around the show is clear and friendly, with ushers helping audiences navigate a space that could easily feel intimidating or confusing. That care matters. Site-specific theatre asks audiences to relinquish some of the comforts and conventions of a traditional theatre building; the production needs to give something back.

A practical warning: get there early if you want a seat with a back!

As much as I enjoyed the production (and I am sticking to 5 stars!), I agree with the critics who have found the final section less successful. The declining illness needs tightening. We know what is going to happen. The interesting question is what that knowledge does to the people involved. Once mortality is established, I wanted the production to move more decisively towards the friendship, the choices, the anger, the love and the complicated business of accompanying someone towards death. There is richer dramatic territory there than in watching the mechanics of decline.

O'Hagan gives us another line that seems resonates:

“Go gently with people's pain. It's the same as yours.”

It is a beautiful sentiment, but it also points towards the more interesting question for the drama: how do we go gently with one another's pain?

The ending simply doesn't land. After the emotional and theatrical investment of the preceding two hours, I wanted something that trusted the audience to sit with the complexity rather than bringing the story to such a sudden close.

And yet, the production's central proposition remains remarkably strong.

There is a third quotation from O'Hagan that hangs over the whole story: the recognition that “humanity has a 100 per cent mortality rate”. That sounds bleak. Mayflies isn't.

Instead, it asks what we do with the limited time we have and why the friendships, music, places and moments of our younger lives can remain so vivid decades later. This is what makes Mayflies such a successful Edinburgh Fringe experience. It is a gorgeous coming-of-age story, beautifully performed and imaginatively translated into a theatrical environment that makes the journey, the building and the audience's individual perspective part of the work. The warehouse isn't simply a backdrop. Getting there isn't simply logistics. Where you sit isn't simply a matter of comfort.

All those things contribute to the experience. I will take an ambitious, occasionally imperfect production that understands the possibilities of its place over a safe production that could happen anywhere.

Grid Iron has been making site-specific work for thirty years. Mayflies feels like a particularly apt anniversary production: a story about looking backwards, remembering the people we were, and asking what remains.

And sometimes the best thing a Fringe production can do is make you feel that you have travelled somewhere, even if that somewhere is only a warehouse in Leith.

Review by Kate Gaul