Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Matt Winning: Solastalgia | The City for Incurable Women | 2025 Salem Witch Trial | Chrome Yellow | Always, Sometimes, Maybe | Do Astronauts Masturbate in Space?
The future of the planet might look bleak but academic turned entertainer Dr Matt Winning’s tragicomic hour on the climate crisis is funny, poignant and deeply human
THEATRE
Matt Winning: Solastalgia ★★★★
Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 24 August
Matt Winning - sorry, Dr Matt Winning - imagines mirror worlds for a living. No, he’s not some kind of spaced-out sci-fi geek. Instead, he analyses the evidence to predict the effects of even the smallest changes in temperature on agriculture, trade, migration, conflict - oh, and the small matter of the possibility of humans’ very existence in a near-future world. To cut to the chase, things aren’t looking good.
And then… he makes a Fringe show about the whole thing. And a gently funny, deeply human and profoundly poignant show at that, however unlikely that sounds given Winning’s, well, let’s say bleak subject matter. Weaving together history and science with damning accounts of oil barons’ greed and his own personal journey, he finds a winning (sorry) balance between hope and despair, and between comedy and tragedy, one that not only shines an unforgiving light on mistakes and avarice of the past (and present), but also offers reasons to believe that things might turn out not quite as darkly as we imagine.
Winning weaves together his themes convincingly, never stinting on academic insight while admitting mistakes and frailties of his own (being born in Paisley being one of them - among several gags that will no doubt hit a nerve with Scots). It’s a well-structured and well-paced hour, but Winning’s delivery could probably do with a bit of polish before he delivers it with the assurance it needs. His staging is minimal and might be used a bit more powerfully, but in the end it’s what Winning has to say that really hits home. There’s plenty here to shed new light on what probably gives us all nightmares - not all of it reassuring - but grab Winning afterwards and you might get answers to more of your questions. Solastalgia is a simple but quietly eloquent show, but the insights it offers into our current climate predicament make it an important one.
DAVID KETTLE
THEATRE
The City for Incurable Women ★★★
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 60) until 25 August
There was a time when the hospital and stage definitions of the word ‘theatre’ used to be less separate, Charlotte McBurney’s scholarly narrator tells us. It’s the catalyst for a collage-like, largely comic journey through history to explore the origins of what, during the late 18th-century and into most of the 19th, was described by medics and the wider world that they helped to shape as “hysterical” women.
Starting with how female patients were examined on stage as a kind of ‘show’ by Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, the piece relishes the comic strangeness of the sexist attitudes, actions and procedures from the 1800s, but also draws in the ancient Greeks and what came later, including women’s rights, world wars, 1950s housewives, Salvador Dali and ‘mad bitch’ slogan t-shirts.
It's a fascinating, theatrical journey full of physicality, from fish in a dress theatre company, in which McBurney playfully shifts between commentator and characters, male and female roles, before the dissemination descends into a more confused kind of ‘madness’ that feels in need of greater clarity. Both Charcot and McBurney use the women’s bodies to make their points in an intriguing cross-century conflict, but one that inevitably ends up telling us less about these women than the way they’ve been defined and continue to be defined by their health conditions.
SALLY STOTT
THEATRE
2025 Salem Witch Trial ★★★
Greenside @ George Street until 23 August
I’d better choose my words carefully, lest self-described witch Gretchen Wylder hex me from across town. Actually, as she explains in her engaging solo show, Wylder is more interested in healing poultices and therapy through tarot readings than she is in flinging curses or summoning demons. Nonetheless, she still finds herself in deep trouble – and facing increasingly sinister threat – from devout Christians when she buys a cottage in their spooky woodland community near Salem, Massachusetts. As she pithily sums up early on in the show, there ain’t no hate quite like Christian love.
Wylder’s tale of embracing her queerness and her love of the occult, then finding those qualities condemned by those around her, is a compelling one, and it’s clearly quite the ride she’s been on – conveyed through energetic narration and nicely lo-fi videos of herself playing her tarot clients and her pious tormentors. By sticking so doggedly to her own personal story, though, she misses the opportunity of putting her tribulations in a broader context, so that there are few insights beyond her accounts of her individual experiences, vivid though those are. And despite the show’s nicely fluid, conversational form, Wylder might have encouraged even greater connection with her fascinated audience by ditching the prompt cards.
DAVID KETTLE
THEATRE
Chrome Yellow ★★★
ZOO Southside (Venue 82) until 24 August
In 2021, Jersey writer and performer Wayne Stewart set off on a 650-mile walk from the northern coast of France all the way south to the Mediterranean. Why? It’s a question he continually grapples with across the course of his quiet, reflective solo show. Perhaps simply to get over a recent break-up, or perhaps to encourage connections with others. But ultimately, does an act like that need to have any meaning or purpose at all?
One of a clutch of Fringe shows exploring a search for spiritual meaning through long-distance walks, Chrome Yellow is an episodic but gently revelatory work. Stewart reads from the journal he kept (perhaps a little too often for dramatic impetus), sketches in memories of environments and meetings with others, and even does a pretty convincing Elvis impression. Beyond his road-trip anecdotes, however, is the perpetual question of, not what is life’s meaning, but whether it needs to even have one. And shining through all of it is the vibrant colour of the show’s title, which gradually becomes a mysterious spiritual beacon in Stewart’s life – though he later wonders whether there’s a more mundane explanation for his deep love of yellow. He’s an engaging performer, though a little more variety in tone and pace might have made Chrome Yellow more compelling.
DAVID KETTLE
THEATRE
Always, Sometimes, Maybe ★★★
Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 23 August
Created and performed by Michele Stine, Always, Sometimes, Maybe is a solo clown show exploring the fundamentals of friendship and connection. Here, Stine plays a janitor named Lou, who repurposes trash (specifically ‘good trash’) by turning it into art materials.
“Trash can be magic,” Lou says. “Some people think trash is dead, but I just think you have to breathe life back into it.” From found materials, she creates puppets with detailed histories, all of which are made using fragile items like cotton wool, gauze, or tape from the inside of a cassette.
The magic Lou speaks of occurs in the smallest and most makeshift of moments, such as through shadow-play, or juggling plastic bags in the wind. By imagining and overlaying these lives, Stine builds a community of characters who require specific forms of attention or support.
The audience has a hand in enacting these gestures of care, as Lou, in her loneliness, which feels like watching the world from behind soundproof glass, has forgotten the rules of friendship. The whimsy at the heart of Always, Sometimes, Maybe can become saccharine in places – however, it retains a charm and playfulness that is accessible, irrespective of age.
JOSEPHINE BALFOUR-OATTS
THEATRE
Do Astronauts Masturbate in Space? ★★★
Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 23 August
To save you a Google; the answer to the question posed by the title is “yes” and while it may not initially seem to have any relevance to this quietly effective two-hander, it is relevant. Set in a very near dystopian future Britain where Nigel Farage is Prime Minster, this follows a young couple, Lily and Gareth (played by the play’s writers, Briony Martha and Zak Reay-Barry) who, after unexpectedly falling pregnant are required to register the conception and attend a week-long island retreat in order to gain their “Stork Card”.
At first this futuristic window-dressing seems just that; a theatrical device that allows the couple to be interrogated with invasive personal questions by unseen officials. However, it’s also a neat metaphor for the loss of control you can feel when preparing to welcome a child; the creeping suspicion that your life is not your own anymore. While there’s more than a hint of a primer for soon-to-be parents about this, Martha and Reay-Barry work well together and have real chemistry, utilising physical theatre to emphasise the couple’s developing anxieties. Science fiction can be notoriously hard to successfully pull off on stage but this works by using the genre to focus on the characters.
RORY FORD
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