Camden Fringe 2026
AD vs H
Bruniswann Theatre Company
Genre: Comedic, Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, LGBTQ+, New Writing, Physical Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Etcetera Theatre, Camden
Festival: Camden Fringe
Low Down
Sara Bei’s and Ella Brock’s AD vs HD is revived at Rosemary Branch Theatre for the Camden Festival through August 12 directed by Ilker Oztur for Bruniswann Theatre Company.
A gem, and not to be missed
Review
This is the play with back-flips. It might be an alternative title. Bea’s come home. Alice is still there. Their Dad is somewhere in Portugal with a new girlfriend, but hovers. 27-year-old Bea (Sara Bei) has given up her job in accounts and is trying to return to what she loves best: gymnastics coaching. Alice (Ella Brock) an award-winning fashion in 2024 has now, at 25, sold her sewing machine. She’s had one for 20 years. What’s happening?
Sara Bei’s and Ella Brock’s AD vs HD is revived at Rosemary Branch Theatre (after its Etcetera premiere) for the Camden Festival through August 12 directed by Ilker Oztur for Bruniswann Theatre Company. Oztur’s also the effective sound designer (plenty of music), and for this Fringe lighting designer too (elsewhere it’s Lander Martinez, whose atmospheric switches made the original a small world).
In just 45 minutes, the sisters’ minute interactions – defensive, resentful Alice who lives in a jumble, and neat uber-toned Bea – seem like the genes have split. Like a lot of siblings they’re opposites, but this seamlessly written and moving study of two sisters with different kinds of collisions to negotiate – often each other – is nuanced so naturalistically you might miss it. Well not the back-flips.
When Bea, full of beans bounces into their once-and-maybe-future-shared bedroom she’s come with a suitcase of issues. And that’s just the clothes she has nowhere to put. Keep them in the suitcase suggests messy Alice, who’s been frantically tidying up before Bea arrives. Only for everything to go clothes-shaped once Bea opens the cupboard.
Oztur and his team have crafted a messy microcosm of a room, half decorated by Alice: an attempt not to intrude on that phantom Bea space (now filled like a bouncy castle has come to stay), or delineate territory with a lick of paint.
When one exits, we’re introduced to snatches of a life. Bea twice voice-mails her ex-flatmate Kiara who seems to have edged her out because her boyfriend Tom is moving in. And she’s in on a secret Bea’s withholding from Alice for the best of reasons; she hopes. Still, slightly bossy Bea can’t help leaving Kiara advice about humidifiers either. Alice to withholds secrets and these tensions edge AD vs HD into moments of farce: just about anything can tumble out at the wrong (and theatricality right) moment.
Relationship are edgily broached. “Girlfriends… boyfriend?” asks Bea, hedging her bets. “God no!” Alice has split up with her long-term girlfriend. Bea declares she’s “still straight, unfortunately” which Alice derides as in bad taste.
What Bei and Brock convey so viscerally is the slow accommodations and trip-wires two slightly estranged sisters have to edge around before they can trust themselves to hold truth openly or hold each other. Their unspoken feelings well up. Alice has missed Bea but now won’t look at her. She also hesitates minutely before exiting with Bea to buy a sandwich. She’s clearly agoraphobic but won’t let on. Bea’s been blonde some time to Alice’s surprise but she declared she blocked Alice “as a joke… then forgot”. These micro-aggressions and hurts multiply and get partially resolved only to simmer. Alice works on a fashion article. Bea pretends she’s making job-applications for the kind of job she quit. Or something else. Even when Bea gets Alice to hold her, Bea’s restless body – a part of who she is – kicks in.
So does Bea’s body and an energetic mis-time results in a kind of breakthrough, shown with a patient tender realism here. Both Bea and Alice have restless minds, but Bea’s body too kicks in if her mind doesn’t. But who’s the better dancer when it comes to Vivaldi’s Spring concerto? As the weeks tick by, the sisters learn intimacy again, but what’s their biggest challenge? It’s not back-flips though Bei displays some spectacular moves, to cheers from the audience.
As Alice tells Bea “I’m mad at what you did despite who you are.” Both sisters have what the other lacks: both admire each other’s talents, both are a bit jealous. And Bea ran away. As plot reveals twist into happiness, the end surprises too. Something which hasn’t been built up is meant as a pay-off but which might need further threading to make it land. It’s a heart-warming show though, and you might cheer as much as the first audiences have.
Both Bei and Brock give exceptional – and exceptionally idiomatic – performances, and Bei’s gymnastics rightly earn whoops and a few gasps.
The play reminds me in its surprising but wholly naturalistic storyline of the late Claire McIntyre’s Low-Level Panic from as long ago as 1989. The calibrations of ADHD, minutely observed, comically integrated and pun into a Hadron collider of comedy, renders AD vs HD both urgent and an almost sweet way into looking steadily: at obsessions which ride all of us to a degree. It’s exquisite and not only believable, but relatable. One tiny caveat aside, it’s a gem, and not to be missed.
