Xloe Rice & Natasha Roland - Edinburgh Fringe 2025

And then the Rodeo Burnt Down

What if They Ate the Baby?

A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First

theSpaceUK@Niddry St

Consecutive Fringe First winners Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice return to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025 playing all three of their award-winning works across the festival. For fans like me this is a great opportunity to see the work in sequence and enjoy a second viewing of this striking work. Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice are a New York City based, writer/performer company of two who have collaborated for over a decade, creating clown-esque absurdist physical theatre.

“And then the Rodeo Burnt Down” is the first of the three pieces This is a queer comedy clown story about a clown, Dale, who wants to become a cowboy; Dale’s “shadow,” Dilly-Dally, who just wants to be a rodeo clown, the star cowboy who puts Dale in his place. And a bull named Arnold who puts everything in perspective. Why would the rodeo burn down anyhow?  The show is tightly choreographed and scripted even when it appears a bit rough around the edges.  It has such a light touch that it feels like virtuosic improvisation and that’s the point.  It eventually becomes absurdly meta, and the audience is on the edge of seats. Like the characters, the performers now jostle for independence inside the structure they have created for themselves. Is this a piece about writing you own queer story, claiming your identity and independence, being true to yourself?  This is a big-hearted love story and permission to burn it all down!

“What if They Ate the Baby? is a queer theatrical dystopia, probing a relationship of two American housewives (Dottie and Shirley), trapped in a shared liminal space of a suburban household and their own love affair. Post second world war feminism, the stay-at-home mum and the American Dream are all under examination here. It’s not particularly ground-breaking stuff – that is, until you experience the Roland and Rice spin on these themes. After the masculine world of rough and tumble clown cowboys in “And Then the Rodeo Burned Down” it is a delight to see the pair explore femininity.  But then the hyper masculine cowboy and housewife are both “performing”, right? Percolating themes of surveillance, paranoia, capitalism all orbit a queer centre. The work is political with a light touch.

Drawing on their own experiences of being in military families comes an inspired work about an idealised American childhood, and the boys it left behind:  “A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First.” In what is surely a masterclass for the ideal fringe drama this goes straight into my top ten again this year. A bare stage save for a large truck tyre, a soundscape of birds and insects at night, a monumentally beautiful script and adorable characters instantly transport us to a world with the feel of Huckleberry Finn, but Lyndon B Johnson is president of the USA, and the Beatles are hot.

It is an eccentric title and gives a profound resonance to the work as we watch Ace (Natasha Roland) and Grasshopper (Xhloe Rice) play a pair of muddy kneed 7-year-old boy scouts in gloriously decorated costumes.  They recount boyish escapades, they speak in codes, they dare each other to be great, they play soldiers, they swing rope.  Sneaking out of the house one night to the station of their small town, they eagerly await the passing of a train in which rides LBJ. In the shadow of the Vietnam war, people of the USA clung to LBJ as a figure of stability and sureness an do these two boys.  Both have absent father figures and higher powers become stand-ins for authority – God is in there too, but she/he gets less of a footprint in this play except when God is mixed up with LBJ!  Ace and Grasshopper are learning to be men. To make a promise, a man must both spit and shake on it, there is nothing greater a man can be than a soldier, and never (ever) hold hands with another man (unless it’s an extreme circumstance). What is the moment that a boy becomes a man? If the American idea of masculinity - one that equates violence with strength - makes casualties out of men, then in war for what are young men dying?

The Beatles tunes accompanied deftly on harmonica by the performers: “Ob-La-Di. Ob-La-Da” expresses their vitality and fizz, “I want to Hold your Hand” perhaps expressing deeper (private) feelings.  The harmonica is also an eerie instrument, and the performers use it to great effect later in the piece. Performed in the round the effortless choreography, overall staging and physicality is elegant and assured. The playwrighting is rigorous and wastes not a moment or a word in conveying story, character and theme.

There is a progression towards something sharper and more political in the later work. Three years in, the costumes have lost their sparkle, the whitened and rouged faces are not perhaps as radical as they were. There is no denying the talent and vision of this duo.  Now, we eagerly await a new production.

Review by Kate Gaul