Frumpus — Landed I really wanted to like this. Frumpus is a long-running Sydney experimental performance collective, known for irreverent, absurdist, physically theatrical work, now returning after a lengthy hiatus. They come with pedigree: a long history of making strange, irreverent, experimental work, emerging from a particularly fertile period in Sydney’s performance culture. In Landed, Cheryle Moore, Lenny Ann Low and Stephanie Hart relish that history with the company's familiar appetite for cheap props, pop culture, exaggerated bodies, fake blood and gloriously ridiculous transformation. Frumpus has described its own practice in terms of striking visual imagery, text, orchestrated sound and a distinctive visual language, with an appetite for pop culture, beauty, grotesque imagery and the monstrous female. That last idea is particularly intriguing now. What does it mean to make the female body monstrous in 2026, when so many of the old cultural anxieties around women - ageing, sexuality, beauty, appetite, excess and unruliness - have been challenged and repackaged? Landed brushes against those questions. Landed should have been catnip. There are moments when you can see it. One performer who could really work a yo-yo. A beautifully silly skit involving a horror door and the increasingly desperate attempts to get out. Ancient bar wenches arriving with tankards of beer, the mugs topped with gloriously fake, fluffy foam, followed by food, then the inevitable mess and suddenly the whole thing side-lit through a heap of low fog. That was genuinely great. A strong theatrical image, beautifully timed, beautifully ridiculous. There is also a hint of the Brontës, and I wanted more of it. Much more. It suggests a darker, stranger world that the production never quite commits to. The Brontë reference particularly intrigued me because it seemed to open a door into something more psychologically charged. There is so much there to play with: confinement, desire, female rage, hysteria, isolation, the wild landscape, the gothic and the grotesque. Landed gives us a glimpse of that world, a tantalising fragment. This is where Landed became frustrating for me. There are clearly interesting ideas and images at work. But too often they arrive and disappear; an idea sparks, an image lands, a character or conceit appears, and then the work moves on. I wanted more of the ideas to land with the force of the images. That is what I wanted from Landed: not polish, but commitment. Not explanation, but a deeper pursuit of the strange worlds it kept hinting at. Perhaps that is what I kept bumping up against. I don't need every image to have an explanation, but I do want to see what happens when artists stay with an idea long enough for it to transform. The beer, the foam, the mess and the fog didn't need explaining; they simply worked. They created an image, a rhythm and an atmosphere. I wanted more of Landed to trust that kind of theatrical intelligence. Moore, Low and Hart have assembled a world full of intriguing visual possibilities - costumes, lighting, sound, props and physical transformation. Of course, this is also what Fringe is for. You get the work out of the rehearsal room, put it in front of an audience, take the temperature and discover what is actually there. Not every experiment needs to arrive fully formed. There is value in artists being able to take a low-risk punt, make something strange, and find out what survives contact with an audience. Landed is still finding its shape. I came away frustrated rather than dismissive. I could see flashes of something genuinely exciting. I just wanted more of them. Review by Kate Gaul

Dancing with the Roots “Their youth is not a limitation; it is the work’s great strength.” Stepping off the train at Fairfield, the city traveller enters another world. One of Sydney’s most culturally diverse suburbs, Fairfield is home to a significant Colombian community, and Dancing with the Roots begins by inviting us to look beyond the familiar geography of the city and into the histories, memories and cultural practices carried by those who have made this place home Created and performed by three emerging Colombian Australian artists — Guillermo Robayo Gómez, Dica & Daniela Zambrano — Dancing with the Roots is an intimate and experimental exploration of ancestry, identity and belonging. The work is heartfelt and ambitious, and there is something particularly affecting about watching young artists grapple so openly and generously with the question of where they come from and what they carry with them. They use dance, spoken word, music and testimony. The opening sequence takes us into the ancient and mystical world of tobacco. Long before colonisation, tobacco was an important plant within Indigenous cultures across Colombia and South America, used not simply for smoking but for medicine, ceremony, offerings and spiritual practice. Among the Muysca, for example, tobacco was one of the sacred substances used in rituals and offerings, while Indigenous traditions across Colombia have understood the plant as a means of connecting the human, spiritual and natural worlds. This history gives the opening of Dancing with the Roots a particular resonance. Tobacco becomes more than an object or image: it is a portal into ancestral knowledge, spirituality and connection to Country. The performers reach back towards a pre-colonial history while simultaneously asking what it means for that history to survive, transform and find expression in the bodies of a younger generation living far from Colombia. The work doesn't attempt to reconstruct this history literally. Instead, smoke, movement, sound, image and text create an evocative and sometimes dreamlike landscape. Each artist works to their particular strengths, moving between dance, monologue and live music. Spanish-language singing adds another layer of intimacy, while the physicality of the performers allows stories and memories to be communicated without always needing to be translated into words. As the performance progresses, Dancing with the Roots moves beyond the artists themselves. A beautifully realised video sequence (Jesús Gómez & Guillermo Robayo Gómez) brings the work into dialogue with members of the older Colombian community, allowing the voices and experiences of elders to enter the space. The effect is poignant. And it is the youth of these artists that makes the work so powerful. There is an openness and vulnerability in their performance that cannot be manufactured. They are still emerging artists, still finding their theatrical voices, and that sense of discovery is part of what makes Dancing with the Roots so moving. Their youth is not a limitation; it is the work's great strength. We witness artists reaching backwards into history while simultaneously making something of their own. The final movement breaks down the boundary between performer and audience, inviting us into a participatory dance. It is a fitting conclusion to a work concerned with connection between generations, between cultures, and between the individual and the community. Dancing with the Roots is ideal for audiences interested in emerging contemporary performance, physical theatre, live music and intercultural storytelling. It will particularly resonate with migrant, diasporic and multicultural audiences, but its themes are much broader: memory, identity, ancestry and belonging. For the sheer heart of the work, the ambition of these emerging artists, and the powerful poignancy of witnessing young people discovering, questioning and celebrating their roots — this is must-see. Review by Kate Gaul

Cold War 2.0 (Dopplegangster) "Then something comes along that jams the filing cabinet." As much as I want to avoid putting this into words, Doppelgangster’s Cold War 2.0 was one of those undeniable Fringe experiences. Perhaps this is what happens when you're just back from Edinburgh Fringe. You spend several weeks training yourself to move from theatre to theatre, day after day, until the business of seeing things becomes almost as physical as making them. Back in Sydney, that instinct hasn't quite left you. You find yourself following your feet. They know where to go. Mine took me to Doppelgangster. And then I wanted to write about it. Which feels slightly ridiculous. There is a particular absurdity in trying to turn a live theatrical encounter into a few tidy paragraphs. Especially when the work itself refuses to behave tidily. I have written plenty of reviews, and I understand the usefulness of them. But occasionally a piece of theatre makes the whole exercise feel inadequate: what exactly are we meant to do with something that is less a proposition to be assessed than an experience to be survived, absorbed and argued with afterwards? Cold War 2.0 is difficult to summarise. It is loud, anarchic, funny, political, stupid, clever, deeply theatrical and, at times, completely bewildering. It throws ideas, images, arguments, songs, paranoia, history, technology, bodies and the audience itself into some kind of punk centrifuge and lets us work out what survives. I don't think I need to tell you what it is about. Other people have already had a go, with varying degrees of certainty, and that uncertainty seems entirely appropriate. One response embraces the work's collision of punk, politics and theatrical chaos; another essentially admits that the experience initially left them baffled and irritated, before realising that the bafflement was part of what the work had done to them. That feels about right. What I will say is that I have enormous respect for Tobias Manderson-Galvin, Aquilla Sorensen and the Doppelgangster gang. Because this is handmade theatre. Not handmade in the precious sense. Handmade in the sense that you can feel the people who made it. You can feel the risk. The argument. The intelligence. The bad idea that somehow became a good one. The willingness to let something get messy rather than sanding all the edges off it so that an audience - or a reviewer - can comfortably consume it. This is increasingly rare. The thing about Fringe, particularly after Edinburgh, is that it becomes easy to start looking at theatre as product. You see so much of it that you develop a shorthand. You can feel yourself reaching for the mental filing cabinet: excellent performer; interesting idea; strong writing; beautiful design; perhaps twenty minutes too long; not for me. Then something comes along that jams the filing cabinet. Cold War 2.0 did that for me. My post show response on the Sydney Fringe website was considerably less articulate. I called Doppelgangster “wonderful, unpredictable artists” and described the work as handmade and anarchic. I said it reminded me of being back at university in the 1980s - wild, smart and brilliant, and very, very loud. I'm also not sure I can improve on it. Except perhaps to say that the word I keep coming back to is undeniable. It is satisfying that Doppelgangster describe Cold War 2.0 as a “living-wake redux” of their earlier Cold War. That is their phrase, not mine, but it got me thinking about what Dopplegangster seems to do so well: take things that are already dead, finished, canonised or supposedly understood, and refuse to leave them alone. There’s an interesting echo of this in Doppelgangster’s relationship with the Ibsen Scope Foundation. They have received an Ibsen Scope Grant for their work, and their current project continues that conversation with Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. An electrifying progression. The new work takes an old canonical text that has been sitting safely in the theatre graveyard and drags it back into the present. A nifty piece of continuity between two projects? It could be description of the artistic impulse itself. Don't leave it dead. Don't leave it finished. Don't leave it where we found it. That Doppelgangster is selected for the Ibsen Scope Grant is substantial recognition for an Australian independent company. The 2026 grant round selected just five projects internationally from 207 applications across 65 countries. The Ibsen Scope jury cited qualities including playfulness, boldness and originality: qualities that feel entirely legible in Cold War 2.0. Having spent an hour with Doppelgangster and Cold War 2.0, I can't imagine anyone else making it. Perhaps that is the thing I want to hold onto. Not whether Cold War 2.0 is “good”. Not whether I understood all of it. Not even whether I liked all of it. But that feeling of encountering artists who have developed such a particular theatrical language, and who are still prepared to push it somewhere that might fail. That is a very good reason to follow your feet. Review by Kate Gaul

When Prophecy Fails ★★★ A beautifully composed production I admired considerably more than I loved. The story itself is stranger than fiction. In 1954, Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin claimed to be receiving messages from extraterrestrial beings who warned that a catastrophic flood would destroy the world. Her small group of followers, known as the Seekers, prepared for the apocalypse and believed they would be rescued by flying saucers. When the predicted destruction failed to materialise, psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter were there to observe what happened next. Their 1956 book When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World became a landmark study of cognitive dissonance - the psychological discomfort created when deeply held beliefs collide with contradictory reality. Groupwork takes this extraordinary case study as its starting point, translating the documented events and the psychologists’ observations into a physical, visual and sonic theatrical experience. There is a lot to admire in When Prophecy Fails. The movement is precise and often beautiful, the staging is carefully composed, and the technical elements - sound, video, lighting and spatial design - work together with considerable sophistication. This is a production that knows exactly how to make an image, how to build a rhythm and how to hold a stage. And yet, for me, something fundamental remained out of reach. When Prophecy Fails, created by Groupwork, takes its starting point from the extraordinary true story of a 1950s American UFO cult and the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. When the group's promised apocalypse fails to arrive, their faith doesn't necessarily collapse. Instead, belief finds another way to survive. It's a fascinating premise and I found myself continually aware of the idea of the work rather than emotionally caught up in it. The performers move through a landscape of ritual, repetition and increasingly elaborate physical patterns. Bodies gather, disperse, synchronise and fracture. Images accumulate. Video, sound and lighting create an atmosphere that can be eerie, hypnotic and at times genuinely arresting. The movement is undoubtedly the strongest element for me. There is a real intelligence in the composition of bodies in space, and the production has a visual vocabulary that feels assured and distinctive. Technically, it is beautifully put together. I kept waiting to care. Not necessarily to care about the cult's beliefs - belief systems can be fascinating without being sympathetic - but to feel some kind of human connection to the people inside this extraordinary story. Instead, I remained slightly outside the frame, admiring the construction without becoming invested in what was being constructed. That creates an odd tension. The work is ostensibly asking us to think about belief: what happens when reality contradicts what we desperately want to be true? Why do people hold onto an idea when the evidence says otherwise? How do we rationalise the irrational? Those are big, rich questions, and they feel particularly pertinent now. The theatrical language never quite transformed those questions into an experience I could feel. When Prophecy Fails remained an impressive piece of theatre that I admired considerably more than I loved. Three stars for the craft, the movement and the extraordinary visual and technical composition but I wanted the work to get under my skin, rather than simply impress me from the outside. Review by Kate Gaul

Taverna Miresia – Mario, Bella, Anastasia ★★★★★ Verdict: Sublime! I don’t want Banushi to explain the dream. I want to surrender to it. I first came across Mario Banushi’s work from Greece and, two years ago, finally caught Goodbye, Lindita at Adelaide Festival. It was one of those theatrical encounters that stays somewhere in the body. Now, at the Edinburgh International Festival, I have finally seen Taverna Miresia – Mario, Bella, Anastasia and I am reminded again just how extraordinary Banushi’s particular theatrical language is. Sublime is the word I keep coming back to. Banushi is a Greek Albanian actor, director and theatre-maker, born in Albania and raised in Greece. His work sits between theatre, installation, cinema, ritual and dream. His Romance Familiare trilogy: Ragada, Goodbye, Lindita and Taverna Miresia draw on family memory, displacement, death and mourning. But to call these works autobiographical grief theatre is to miss what makes them so powerful. There are stories here. Of course there are. In Taverna Miresia, Banushi’s father has died. The family gathers around the absence he has left behind. The title comes from the neon sign from his father’s restaurant in Tirana. Miresia, meaning kindness in Albanian. Mario himself performs alongside Katerina Kristo, Rita Lytou, Eftychia Stefanou and the extraordinary Greek singer Savina Yannatou. The narrative is a doorway. What Banushi does is create theatre that seems to bypass the rational part of the brain and tap directly into the unconscious. You can spend the evening trying to work out who is who, what has happened, what a particular gesture means, why a body is behaving in a particular way, what the mud, the food, the bathroom, the grave, the restaurant sign or the sudden transformation of a domestic space might signify. Then you have stop trying to solve it. You are dreaming. That is what I found compelling about Goodbye, Lindita and now Taverna Miresia. The works are wordless, but they are not silent. They are dense with sound, bodies, objects, light, music, ritual and repetition. A room can become a memory. A domestic gesture becomes a ceremony. A dead person can remain violently present through an empty chair, a coat, a bed, a sign. In Goodbye, Lindita, the family mourns the death of Banushi’s stepmother, following closely on the death of his father. Banushi was recently awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, where the jury recognised his rigorously visual, non-verbal theatrical language and its ability to move between intimacy and myth, memory and family. We don't make much work like this in Australia. Or perhaps, more accurately, we don't often give artists the conditions to make work like this. A seventy- or eighty-minute, wordless, deeply personal, visually obsessive piece that asks an audience to surrender rather than follow a plot is a difficult proposition for our funding and producing ecology. Who would support it? Who would take the risk? Who would commission it? Who would market it without reducing it to “a haunting meditation on grief”? Banushi’s own explanation of the work is refreshingly uncomplicated: childhood memories influence us whether we are artists or accountants; the void, he says, does not necessarily need to be filled it can be allowed to exist alongside silence and embarrassment. That idea of the void feels fundamental to Taverna Miresia. The father is absent.The absence becomes the architecture. The family doesn't inhabit grief – beautifully, grotesquely, absurdly. There is food, bodily mess, mud, nakedness, ritual, tenderness and something approaching the animalistic. The work moves between the mundane and the mythic without warning. Banushi's work reminds me that theatre can operate like a dream. Dreams don't require exposition. They don't need to explain why the dead suddenly appear, why a familiar room becomes somewhere else, why an ordinary object carries an impossible emotional weight. We recognise the logic even when we cannot articulate it. That is an extraordinary theatrical gift. And there is a lineage here - Greek tragedy, Balkan mourning rituals, folk traditions, contemporary European visual theatre, cinema, installation and the physical vocabularies of the body. It feels like an artist trying to find a form for something that cannot otherwise be said. I don't have an Albanian father who owned a taverna in Tirana. I don't share Banushi's family history, his rituals or his cultural memory. But I recognise the strange domestic choreography of grief. I recognise the way families continue to eat, wash, sleep, argue and sit together while someone enormous has disappeared from the world. I recognise the void. And I think that is why these works get under the skin. Visual, wordless theatre is an extraordinary thing. It asks us to do something increasingly rare in contemporary theatre: stop being told what to think and allow ourselves to feel our way through an experience. I left Taverna Miresia thinking not about what I had understood, but about what had somehow happened to me. That is theatre doing something remarkable. Review by Kate Gaul

The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth ★★★☆☆ There is a very good musical somewhere inside The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth. It just isn't quite this one yet. At 60 minutes, the show feels less like a fully formed musical than an entertaining, highly performed snapshot of a larger work. There are numerous hints towards a longer version and enough material to suggest the ambition is considerably bigger than the Fringe running time allows. The difficulty is that, in its present form, the compression exposes the weaknesses in the writing rather than simply making the show feel fleet. The cast are terrific. The younger performers in particular have a quality that makes them immediately watchable - funny, energetic and completely committed. There is a genuine spark to them. The entire company are also excellent musicians, and the musical performances are arguably the strongest element of the production. The score has plenty of charm and some genuinely enjoyable numbers, delivered with considerable skill. It is therefore frustrating that the characterisation doesn't consistently match the calibre of the performers. The younger characters have much more theatrical life written into them, while the older characters feel considerably thinner. They often function as comic or narrative types rather than people with enough complexity to sustain the emotional weight the show occasionally asks of them. There are interesting themes bubbling underneath the conspiracy comedy - loneliness, grief, belief and the human desire to find meaning and connection - but the older characters in particular are not developed sufficiently for those ideas to land with the force they might. The result is a show that is much funnier and more engaging when it is simply allowing its young performers to rip into the material than when it asks us to invest emotionally in its adult relationships. Visually, there is more success. The floor cloth is terrific: simple, bold and wonderfully effective, providing a strong visual frame without cluttering the stage. It is a good example of how a relatively economical design choice can have real theatrical impact. The choreography is less successful. With a company this musically accomplished, you want the movement to have the same vitality as the singing. Instead, much of it feels pedestrian and underpowered. The performers appear capable of much more than the choreography is giving them. And that becomes the central frustration of The Shocking Truth About Flat Earth. There is clearly talent here - a lot of it. There is a likeable score, a good central comic premise and performers who can absolutely hold a stage. But talent can't quite compensate for a script that hasn't fully worked out its characters, or direction and choreography that don't always exploit the considerable abilities of the company. At its best, the show is infectiously energetic and genuinely funny. At its weakest, it feels like a development draft that has been put in front of an audience before all the pieces have found their proper shape. Review by Kate Gaul

If I Can’t Dance I’m Not Coming ★★½ There is sincerity here, and a lovely sense of people coming together to dance. But sincerity isn't the same as choreographic rigour. The title is intriguing. If I Can’t Dance I’m Not Coming arrives with the credentials and institutional framing of a serious contemporary dance work, and I went in expecting something polished, contemporary and formally assured. I was also unaware of its connection to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a reference that might have provided a useful entry point had I known to look for it. There are things to admire. Most notably, the multi-generational group of dancers has a warmth and generosity that is difficult not to respond to. There is clearly a heartfelt intention behind the work, and a commitment to collective rather than individual virtuosity. But intention can only carry a work so far. Watching it, I found myself repeatedly asking not “what does this mean?” but “what am I being asked to watch?” The movement vocabulary felt underdeveloped, and the work struggled to generate either the choreographic interest or the performance energy needed to hold my attention. For a piece positioned within a professional contemporary dance context, I expected a greater degree of precision, invention and formal confidence. This isn't a criticism of difficulty. Contemporary performance doesn't need to explain itself, nor does it need to offer conventional narrative or virtuoso display. But there needs to be something in the formal language that compels us to stay with it - an idea developing through the body, a visual proposition, a musical relationship, a tension or transformation. Here, I found myself waiting for that proposition to arrive. The Metropolis connection, with its rich associations of labour, machinery, class and collective resistance, suggests a potentially fertile conceptual framework. Yet without knowing that context beforehand, I found little in the performance itself that made that relationship sufficiently legible or compelling. There is sincerity here, and a lovely sense of people coming together to dance. But sincerity isn't the same as choreographic rigour. Ultimately, I wanted more: more invention, more precision, more risk and a stronger reason to keep watching. Review by Kate Gaul

Anatomy of Survival ★★★★ A coffee order, 22 versions of the truth and a bear: Anatomy of Survival is anything but ordinary. A woman orders a coffee. The barista gets it wrong. She loses it. From this seemingly insignificant encounter, Anatomy of Survival takes us somewhere altogether more surprising: into the strange, unpredictable territory of the human nervous system, and the ways in which we interpret, misinterpret and react to the world around us. This offbeat collaboration between award-winning playwright Vivienne Franzmann and choreographer and psychotherapist Frauke Requardt, brings together 22 very different eyewitness accounts of one everyday altercation to show how our nervous systems are stuck in the Stone Age. The work sits happily and rather unusually between dance, theatre, live music and science. It doesn't ask to be neatly categorised. And that's part of its charm. The story unfolds each offering another version of what happened. Reality becomes slippery. Whose account do we believe? What actually happened? And how much of what we experience is determined by our own histories, instincts and nervous systems? For all its conceptual ambition, what surprised me most was how much the story held me. There is a genuine theatrical momentum here. The acting is strong, the characters are engaging and the shifting perspectives create an intriguing puzzle that keeps us watching. The performers move between spoken theatre and physical expression with an ease that makes the hybrid form feel purposeful rather than decorative. And then there is the visual world. The production is bold, playful and striking, with colour doing almost as much storytelling as the bodies on stage with great costume design (in pinks and mustard) and a setting littered with pink coffee cups. Live drumming adds another visceral layer, giving the piece a physical pulse that connects the theatrical and choreographic elements. And yes, there is a bear. Quite why there is a bear is perhaps beside the point. Its arrival is one of those delicious Fringe moments when you realise you are watching something that could really only exist in the theatre. Anatomy of Survival is interested in serious questions - fight, flight, freeze, perception, threat and the complicated business of being human - but it doesn't insist on solemnity. Instead, it wraps its neuroscience in theatricality, humour, movement, music, colour and a healthy dose of the unexpected. It is dance theatre with a difference: intelligent without being dry, visually adventurous and genuinely entertaining. Most importantly, it left me thinking about how differently two people can experience exactly the same moment — and how quickly our own survival systems can take over the story. Review by Kate Gaul

EXIT ★★★★★ No deeper meaning required. Just four brilliant bodies, ingenious apparatus and the sheer joy of seeing what humans can create. Four great-looking guys, winning smiles and beautifully composed work. There is something wonderfully satisfying about EXIT. From the moment the four performers appear, Circumstances’ Belgian circus artists - Harrison Claxton, Luuk Brantjes, Christopher McAuley and Samuel Rhyner - have you in their hands. Choreographed by Piet Van Dycke, this is circus and dance at its most elegant, playful and precise. I loved the evenness of the tempo. There is a kind of gentle relentlessness to the work: it keeps moving, keeps shifting, keeps surprising, without ever feeling rushed. The four performers have an extraordinary physical rapport, propelling, catching, climbing, balancing and smiling their way through some seriously impressive circus. And then there is the apparatus. The entire theatre is used ingeniously, while the revolving walls and doors reveal just how much fun can be had with a piece of architecture. I suspect the younger members of the audience may leave wondering what else they could possibly do with a door. There is a satisfying visual layer here too in the costuming: a variation on workwear in shades of green, blue, grey and tan. The acrobats appear and reappear in different combinations, sometimes seemingly emerging from nowhere, adding to the constantly shifting picture and the pleasure of watching four bodies become a moving composition. There are no deeper meanings required here. Sometimes you can simply sit back and be in awe, yet again, of what humans can create when skill, imagination and bodies are put to work together. And at its 10.30am timeslot, is a terrific heart-starter for the day. Wake up, walk into ZOO Southside, and watch four exceptionally talented humans make the seemingly impossible look like enormous fun. A show for everyone. A sheer pleasure to watch. Review by Kate Gaul

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."

Handle with Care ★★½☆☆ A beautifully engineered box that ultimately asks the audience to do rather more work than it gives them reason to want to. The idea is considerably more interesting than the event itself. Belgian company Ontroerend Goed have made a career out of messing with the relationship between performer and audience. Founded in Ghent around director Alexander Devriendt, the company has become something of a Fringe institution, creating participatory works that ask audiences to vote, decide, participate and occasionally take over the machinery of the theatre. Their work has won multiple Fringe First, Herald Angel and Total Theatre Awards. Handle with Care takes that experiment to its logical extreme. There are no actors, no technicians and no director. Instead, a box arrives. Inside are objects, instructions and provocations. The audience opens it, follows the prompts, makes decisions, negotiates with one another and collectively creates the performance. It is a deliciously simple premise: what happens if the artists hand over the entire performance to the audience? And this is where the work is undeniably clever. This isn't simply a box of props accompanied by a command to "go and improvise". Ontroerend Goed have carefully designed a theatrical system - the objects, the instructions, the sequence and the rules within which we operate. There is an enormous amount of authorship in the apparent surrender of authorship. Every performance is different because every audience is different. The work is also part of Devriendt's An Hour Spent With Others trilogy, following Funeral and Thanks for Being Here, and continues the company's longstanding interest in what happens when theatre acknowledges the actual people in the room rather than asking us to suspend disbelief. All of which is fascinating. Unfortunately, this time around, I found the actual experience considerably less so. The audience is guided through a series of activities intended to create connection, collaboration and a shared theatrical experience. There is an initial thrill in the awkwardness of strangers figuring out what they're supposed to do together. But too quickly, the exercises began to feel like workshop activities rather than theatrical discoveries. And that distinction matters. Participation is not inherently theatrical. Collective awkwardness is not necessarily profound. And asking an audience to do something doesn't automatically make that something interesting. The paradox of Handle with Care is that the company has constructed an extraordinarily sophisticated machine to produce what, for me, was a surprisingly banal experience. Perhaps that is partly the point. Ontroerend Goed aren't interested in pretending the world outside the theatre doesn't exist. They want us to acknowledge the room, the strangers we're sitting with and the unpredictable social dynamics that emerge between us. But acknowledging reality isn't the same thing as transforming it. There were moments when the audience's different personalities and willingness, or unwillingness, to participate became genuinely interesting. Too often I felt I was being asked to complete an exercise designed to demonstrate the possibility of participatory theatre rather than experiencing a piece of theatre that had found something compelling to say through participation. Which leaves an intriguing question at the heart of the work: When does audience participation become theatre and when is it simply an exercise? I admire the audacity of the proposition. I admire the precision of its construction. And I admire a company prepared to keep dismantling the traditional relationship between artist and spectator. But theatre is ultimately an experience, not a proposition. For me, Handle with Care was a fascinating conceptual experiment wrapped around an unexpectedly ordinary experience - a beautifully engineered box that ultimately asked me to do rather more work than it gave me reason to want to. Review by Kate Gaul

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