The Jolly Fisherman - Edinburgh Fringe 2026

The Jolly Fisherman

★★★★★

“A beautifully crafted story of friendship, belonging and the fault lines that open up when the world around us starts to change.”

I admire The Jolly Fisherman enormously.

John Dinneen's writing is confident, economic, polished and wonderfully nuanced. It takes what could so easily become a straightforward play about race, religion, class or contemporary Britain and instead finds something much more complicated and much more human.

At its heart is a friendship.

Alan and Amir meet as thirteen-year-olds in Barking. One is British, white and shaped by the world of his local pub; the other is British Pakistani and Muslim. They become best friends, growing up alongside one another as the neighbourhood around them changes. Then the place that helped define Alan's sense of belonging disappears.

And suddenly the question becomes: what happens when the place that taught you who you were disappears and you discover that your best friend belongs to a world you have been taught to fear?

Ultimately, this is a play about belonging. About the places we call home, the people who shape us, and the stories we absorb about those who seem different from us. It is about friendship, but also about the frightening ease with which friendship can be tested by forces much larger than two people.

What makes the writing so good is its refusal to make anything easy. Dinneen allows contradictions to sit beside one another. People are complicated. Communities are complicated. History is complicated. Nobody arrives conveniently labelled as hero or villain.

And then there are the performances. Alex Hill and Jonny Khan are superb. Every beat lands. Every thought registers. Every shift in the relationship feels earned. They move effortlessly through more than a decade of friendship, adolescence, conflict and change, creating not only Alan and Amir but the entire world around them.

Two actors create a whole East London community.

That is consummate storytelling.

The simplicity of the production allows the writing and acting to do the heavy lifting, and Layla Madanat's outstanding and elegant direction keeps the pace moving while giving the emotional shifts room to land. We watch these two young men grow up, but we also watch the world grow increasingly complicated around them.

And that is where the two-hander becomes super powerful. The entire changing landscape of East London is essentially created through two people trying to hold onto a friendship while history moves underneath them. That small, human struggle carries the weight of the whole play.

Because history rarely announces itself when it is happening. It arrives through changes to a pub, a neighbourhood, a friendship, a political conversation. Suddenly the world you thought you understood looks different.

The Jolly Fisherman understands that.

It doesn't preach. There are no easy answers. We sit with the discomfort of watching people we care about change and to consider how much of who we become is choice, circumstance, fear, loyalty and the need to belong.

For me, this is one of my picks of the Fringe for theatre.

Smart, beautifully written, beautifully acted and directed and deeply human.

Consummate storytelling.

Review by Kate Gaul