Brighton Fringe 2026
Theatre of Wholiness
Theatre of Wholiness
Genre: Cabaret, Devised, Immersive, Queer Theatre
Venue: The Lantern @ ACT
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
A visually rich queer cabaret blending ritual theatre, archetypal storytelling and contemporary self-help philosophy into a communal fringe experience that clearly found its audience.
Review
Entering Theatre of Wholiness feels less like arriving at a conventional theatre performance and more like stepping into the basement apartment of a performance artist who may also host moon rituals, experimental cabaret nights and deeply emotional conversations at 3am.
The intimate venue, hung with costumes, golden curtains and disco balls, lit in soft cosmic light, creates an atmosphere somewhere between queer ritual space, devised theatre experiment and late-night fringe gathering. Written, produced and performed by Lumi for the Theatre of Wholiness company, the evening begins warmly and informally: jokes, audience interaction, cleansing rituals using Palo Santo, and the quiet sense that everyone is being invited into a temporary shared universe.
The audience embraced this world wholeheartedly. Laughter came easily, participation felt enthusiastic from the start, and the performance quickly took on the energy of a communal happening rather than a traditional theatrical event. At times it felt as though many audience members were already emotionally fluent in the show’s language and references, responding less like detached spectators and more like a community already aligned with its emotional and aesthetic vocabulary.
Structurally, the show unfolds as a journey through archetypal characters representing emotional or spiritual states: grief, shadow, embodiment, transformation, joy. Lumi introduces these figures through elaborate costume changes, songs, poetry, meditation exercises and direct audience interaction, building gradually toward a final idea of self-acceptance and returning “home” to oneself. The costumes are undeniably impressive, forming some of the performance’s strongest visual storytelling. Lumi is physically committed throughout, moving confidently between characters, songs, poetic monologues and audience engagement with real stamina and theatrical control.
Beneath the apparent chaos, the performance contains recurring symbolic threads that reveal themselves more clearly in retrospect. Performed at the Lantern Theatre, the evening returns, subtly and symbolically, to the image of the lantern itself. Early on, Lumi lights a small one while establishing the ritual atmosphere of the room, later referring to artistic beginnings connected to carrying “a little lantern.” By the final transformation, the motif re-emerges as part of the character’s search for where everything began, suggesting home, identity and inner guidance. It becomes one of the few moments where the evening’s fragmented symbolism clicks into something emotionally coherent.
What is interesting, and at times frustrating, is the tension between the show’s sincerity and its reliance on highly recognisable contemporary self-help language. Many moments feel designed as live affirmations, visual manifestations of a healing culture already familiar from social media: trauma as identity, archetypes as emotional categories, symbolic objects standing in for transformation. The piece frequently feels closer to embodied self-help philosophy than fully developed dramatic structure: emotionally accessible, sincere and immediately recognisable, though often delivered with a directness that leaves little room for ambiguity or deeper psychological complexity.
Several ideas are introduced with apparent significance before being loosely resolved or quietly abandoned. A set of keys, initially framed as an important symbolic object, gradually loses dramaturgical meaning. One figure unlocks literal chains while frantically spilling truths; another scatters notes identifying emotional states across the room. A Wiccan-inspired priestess sequence involving singing bowls, guided breathing and meditation gestures points toward ritual depth, though its theatrical purpose remains unclear beyond atmosphere. Certain behaviours recur across multiple personas: tea drinking, confessional storytelling, stylised emotional release. The effect is of one central voice reappearing in different outfits rather than genuinely distinct transformations.
And yet the audience response was overwhelming. Humour that often relied on broad recognisability rather than subtlety still landed strongly with the room. One particularly successful character, a chaotic rave-inspired figure delivering jokes about sunscreen, ageing and not having children, generated some of the evening’s biggest reactions, its exaggerated recognisability doing exactly the work it needed to. By the final sequence, centred on “Player Two”, a figure of transformation and renewal, several audience members were visibly emotional. The evening ended with cheers and a standing ovation.
Perhaps that reaction explains the piece better than analysis can. Theatre of Wholiness is not interested in narrative precision or subtle psychological realism. It offers something else: a communal emotional experience built from humour, ritual aesthetics, queer identity and performative self-reinvention. For audiences willing to surrender to its wavelength, it clearly becomes something meaningful. That it found them so completely is, in its own way, a kind of theatrical success.
