Brighton Fringe 2026
Low Down
Meet Agatha’s Angels, a premium home organisation service with a zero-judgement policy – and zero witnesses. Behind the label maker lies a thriving criminal operation, and when a routine clean-up spirals out of control, three women must mop their way out of a deadly mess. Fast paced black humour!
Review
It all starts with a high energy dance that introduces Angela’s Angels amidst rather a lot of debris. Think a teenager’s bedroom floor but with a lot more random stuff than that. Angela’s Angels clear up stuff that you would really rather have nothing to do with and thereby hangs the plot. As the action moves on you realise if it was a teenagers room it must be a very disturbed teenager.
The three Angels are cleaners who have been sent to clear up a dark basement and it’s within that claustrophobic setting the story unfolds. In fact the story isn’t that important, the delight of the play revolves around the interactions between the three very different women. There are some great gags, some of which last half the performance, and even when the “joke” is revealed there’s a nice call back only minutes later. The plot might have been a bit weak but the performances weren’t. Jane Herbert, Eve Callow-Salt & Martha Powell-Doole establish their respective characters quickly and easily and the audience is right behind them all the way – there’s a lot of spontaneous laughter from the audience.
They had the inventive confidence to make comedy from their interactions, from character based one liners and from the various rather odd props, including a parrot and disconcertingly shaped anal sex toys made out of golf balls. The whole production is a romp, a farce but it’s tightly presented and doesn’t lose its way – often an out and out comedy like this can stall a little, but this did not, which was a credit to the three actors.
They’re not afraid of the odd formation dance routine to break up the hour and that’s great fun too. Fun would be the word I would use to characterise Organised: Crime and it absolutely delivered on its promise. It might not be profound but it is hilarious throughout. That’s not to say that the characters themselves were lacking depth and differentiation: Jane Herbert being slightly vulnerable as the the leader with her small pathetic allergic sneezes, Matha Powell-Doole with her thick French accent, Eve Callow Salt’s intense selfie influencer character were all comic tropes on their own.
I don’t like to give away the jokes from a production like this, but I’ll offer one as an example: the leader of their little group of cleaners reaction to being locked in a rather unsavoury basement was to blurt out that she left her washing in the machine, and if she didn’t get out she have to wash everything again. It was delivered as an aside but it had the audience roaring. A simple joke in some ways, but the other two actors had the coordination and the timing to let the aside through – that’s skilled play.
If I were a Channel 4 producer watching this I would be thinking along the lines of a comedy drama series to rival Derry Girls, real characters working for a criminal clean-up crew, a different crime scene each week audiences rolling on the sofa with laughter. I really would.
