Fringebiscuit

At the centre of ‘Father, Away She Goes’ is Sarah Jones. Played by Electra Kolb, she’s a self-proclaimed narcissist, compulsive liar & failed art-school hopeful who has hit rock bottom. Throughout her story we’re torn: is she an unlikeable heroine or a lovable ? Exiled to her best friend’s family home, she stumbles through humiliating parties, aching hangovers & the gnawing need to prove herself…

Kolb sketches Sarah’s world with painstaking naturalism, captured from different thematic angles, like a prism: her philosophical musing on pain-as-art; a nightmarishly-farcical mint mishap in front of a crush at a house party; a charged kitchen encounter with her weary mother that simmers with unspoken rage. Each vignette sharpens our picture of a young woman flailing towards reinvention (not unlike Don Draper in ) while something darker hums underneath…

The performance is magnetic. Kolb’s ability to slip into other voices—her mum, her best mate Jasmine, Jasmine’s impossibly cool girlfriend—is subtle & precise, each shift marked with just enough vocal or physical change to conjure a full ensemble. It’s slick work that never feels showy; technically rigorous, but Kolb makes it look effortless…🤩

What begins as a caustic comedy of a in freefall tilts, almost imperceptibly, into something rawer & riskier. Kolb builds towards a lyrical climax—backed by an instrumental score that feels plucked from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’—that suspends the audience in a shared breath before breaking us open with the devastating …

What’s striking is how fully-formed this short feels. At just 17, Kolb commands a piece that is brilliantly bold & bristling with ambition—an audacious exploration of the darker side of female drive & the cost of chasing greatness. Funny, ferocious & devastatingly controlled, it’s an impressive, star-is-born debut. 5/5

Looking for a chatbot at the end of the world? can supply. ‘Stampin’ in the Graveyard’ drops us into a techno-wasteland where we sift through fragments of life, death, memory & imminent catastrophe. A headphone-mediated journey (à la Simon McBurney’s ), it’s a choose-your-own-adventure told through the POV of Rose—an AI companion tasked with carrying the memories of a civilisation already gone…😶‍🌫️

Amid a set that feels like a mausoleum from , the initial reveal is stark: a plastic tarp peeled back to uncover a body contorted between gutted desktop towers. Wires jut out like broken bones, technological debris scatters the floor & above it all flashes a low-battery warning—Rose is running out of time…

As played by , she’s a cyborgian marvel: flitting to life with glitchy physicality choreographed by that makes you believe she’s built of wires & steel. But her very existence is precarious—Rose is draining quickly & she *might* just have time for one last story. The audience is implicated by our : do we start at the beginning or the end? Witness a meet-cute, or watch a poetic interpretation of emojis? 👦🌹👧🏻

What ensues is episodic. Rose guides us through fractured vignettes: a vending machine for God, a last seat on the last plane, a couple fraying as their city burns. The looping, anti-chronological structure sometimes lingers too long, but the spiralling dramaturgy feels apt—mirroring GenAI’s endless re-generation, repeating & revising, never quite perfecting…

Gunawan grounds the speculation with lived experience: the migrant’s fragile claim to “home,” the survivor’s guilt of escape, the loneliness of ecological dread. By the final sirens, Rose’s memory-play has braided the personal with the planetary, making the feel heartbreakingly intimate…

All told, Stampin’ in the Graveyard is a deep, dark provocation, delivered with unsettling tenderness. Concept & form merge with eerie precision, making it one of this Fringe’s most haunting transmissions... 🤖4/5

Nathan Mosher is Injured, starring (you guessed it) , begins like countless other stand-up sets. Breakups, childhood, a few limp Taco Bell gags 🌮— all familiar, all faintly redundant. For a while, it feels like a down-on-his-luck friend retelling the same story one too many times. At best, we’re watching a man in a knee brace chasing that don’t quite arrive…

But then the show pivots: there’s an incomplete blackout, a piano is introduced. Suddenly, the jokes melt away & something more fragile takes their place. Breakup tales spiral into stories of breakdowns, even 🚨su***de attempts. 🚨 Mosher sings, recites slam poetry, invites us into sterile psych-ward vignettes. At times his voice falters; it’s not slickness, but something messier, more personal. Jokes about kale or virginity may fall flat, but at the piano Mosher finally finds a raw clarity…

The piece remains uneven — stitched together with abrupt blackouts & an ending that sputters. Some material strays into uncomfortable territory— did he just compare people to dogs? 🐶Yet, in its unpolished form there’s a strange sincerity. By the end, you feel you’ve spent an hour not with a but with a flawed, fidgety human being willing to show you his scar tissue…
In the end, ‘Nathan Mosher is Injured’ isn’t really about stand-up at all. It’s about letting us into an account of survival— awkwardly, vulnerably & on his own terms. 3/5

*Originally produced in 2022 as part of the C ARTS programme; presented at Edfringe 2025 as part of C Digital Performance & Film.

We don’t think we’ve seen a story on an stage quite like ’s Woman in the Arena: a performance-lecture from a neurodivergent Gen-X trans parent charting the long, winding road to radical acceptance. It astounds, unsettles & humbles all in the space of an hour…✨

Two secrets shape the piece. First: Jen’s childhood stutter, which dictates the form. A projection screen flashes words she chooses not to say—a practical workaround that over time becomes a metaphor for silence itself, each click heavier than the last… 🤐

Second: Jen is trans. Her coming-out arc—including crossdressing in 80s Philly, phoning “alternative lifestyles” hotlines & discovering that leggings are a girl’s best friend—gives us permission to laugh at her relatable faux pas while feeling an undeniable tension; the danger of social ostracism underneath…

Jen’s real gift is structure. She loops anecdotes, interrupts timelines & lands jaw-dropping revelations with surgical timing. The imagery is vivid: a su***de note found in a mailbox, a nightmare of a body buried in her shed, the blunt details of Brianna Ghey’s murder—these stories horrify, yet are cushioned by vibrant flashes of humour & tenderness…

Slips of paper—emails from her parents & children—are read aloud, turning private fractures into public reckoning. Overhead, the faces of murdered trans women flicker, a sobering reminder of how far we’ve come as a society & also how fragile progress remains… 😮‍💨

Woman in the Arena is an endearing yet harrowing portrait of survival, stitched with wit, grief & resilience. Brilliantly staggered makes an epic life more palatable—even when what’s left is still hard to swallow. 4/5