Turn your Fucking Phones Off - Edinburgh Fringe 2026

TURN YOUR FUCKING PHONES OFF

Summerhall

★★★★★ “Smart, funny and deliciously subversive: Hannah Maxwell turns our obsession with phones, attention and ourselves into brilliant theatre.”

Born out of the work Maxwell presented at last year's Ed Fringe, this show takes ideas, obsessions and questions and pushes them somewhere ambitious. It is funny, intellectually sharp, wry, noir-ish, sexy and complicated and it leaves you thinking about much more than your phone. We are told: “An ambitious, impactful and timely exploration of human connection in the information age. A town hall meeting at the end of the world. A karaoke booth in a nuclear bunker. A clear-the-air chat between you, me and the rest of our plane of existence mates. A thrilling and vital new work from the multi award-winning theatre maker. As voted for audiences at BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG.”

Maxwell is interested in attention, technology, performance, memory and the strange ways we have come to experience ourselves through screens. But the genius of the show is that she doesn't turn any of this into a lecture. Instead, she makes theatre out of it. The audience is implicated in the argument simply by being there. There is a fine line between satire or send up and truth.  This piece dexterously weaves its way across its political and personal terrain. Rachel Mars and Annie Siddons are credited as dramaturgs.

What happens to our attention when everything is designed to capture it? What happens to memory when our experiences are constantly photographed, recorded and stored? What happens to performance when the audience is also a potential documentarian, commentator and content creator?

Maxwell understands that the phone is not simply a device. It is an extension of the contemporary self: camera, archive, social life, workplace, distraction, reassurance and occasionally a very efficient way of avoiding being where you are.

And she is very funny. A consummate theatre maker and performer.

There is a delicious contradiction at the heart of the show. We are sitting in a theatre, one of the oldest technologies for collective attention, being asked to consider what has happened to our capacity to pay attention. Maxwell plays with that contradiction rather than preaching about it. The audience becomes part of the experiment.

The work is also beautifully slippery. It moves between comedy and something darker; between the personal and the conceptual; between the ridiculous and the genuinely affecting. We have pastiche noir and a sensuality.  And, frankly, I too would like to see the show about her Dad and the bears (you had to be there!) That possibility hangs over the work in an intriguing way. Maxwell has clearly got more stories to tell, and the personal material is never simply confessional. It is complicated, mediated and theatrically reworked.

All of this makes perfect sense in the strange, funny universe she has created.

There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about being asked to simply watch. No photographing. No filming. No checking. No half-listening while mentally composing the post about what you are watching. Just an audience and a performer occupying the same space at the same time.

That sounds simple. It isn't.

Maxwell makes us notice how unusual it has become.

This is theatre that understands that form is argument. The way the audience is asked to behave is part of what the work is saying. The theatre becomes a temporary intervention into our habitual patterns of looking, scrolling, recording and consuming.

And underneath all the intellectual playfulness is a rather beautiful proposition: perhaps attention is an act of care.

Turn your fucking phones off. Then watch Hannah Maxwell do something much harder: make you think.

Review By Kate Gaul

A post script - I loved what Lyn Gardner went on to write about this show so I am popping it here:

"There is such a pleasure in watching an artist develop over a period of time at the Edinburgh Fringe: push further, fly that bit higher. Hannah Maxwell has been doing just that. Right from her earliest fringe work - I, AmDram - it was apparent that Maxwell is an artist with a rare ability to both celebrate and critique. Maxwell has never had any inhibitions about breaking into song while simultaneously probing the structures and stories that underpin our lives and the narratives we tell. 

Over a series of shows including Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi and BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG, Maxwell has excavated personal experience, and sometimes trauma, to explore cosmic issues. So, it is with this year’s urgent offering: Turn Your F*cking Phones Off. Even the form of the piece reflects its content: our insatiable doomscrolling while the world burns and bots subvert democratic processes across the world.

Turn Your F*cking Phones Off at Summerhall comes with Maxwell’s trademark mix of playfulness and thoughtfulness. It draw on Maxwell’s experience of working in government strategic communications to explore what happens when our attention is hacked on a worldwide scale; how we lose human connection.

The genius of the piece is the way it artfully uses theatre to bring us together and connect us by making us play together in a way the tech bros and the billionaires who want to keep us glued to the algorithms won’t like at all. This show is a small act of rebellion, a lighthouse of optimism blinking in the dark."