Edinburgh Fringe 2024
River Time!
Genre: Solo Play
Venue: Greenside @ Riddle’s Court, Pickle Studio
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
River Time!’s Laura, dressed as her style-icon Ophelia after Sir John Everett Millais’ painting, intimately and concisely unpacks stories of dating, ADHD, and mental health while stuffing her pockets with rocks. River Time, the phrase her friends recognize as one identifying her personal darkness, is upon her. This vulnerable, honest piece is exactly what the Fringe is all about.
Review
Laura Cathryn Thurlow is putting rocks in her pockets. In the intimate setting of the Pickle Theatre at Greenside Riddle’s Court, she promises to only kill herself if someone in the audience leaves prematurely. This sets the appropriate tone for the show: funny, dark, cultivating nervous concern.
With the economical facility of words usually reserved for thought-provoking essays, Thurlow guides us through the world of “women who can’t cope”. This extends to the likes of Janis Joplin or Virginia Woolf, who prematurely slipped off their mortal coil, as Ophelia’s boyfriend may have put it. Included is perhaps Taylor Swift, “billionaire mastermind who has yet to transcend to her final form: football wife”. Like many women before her, Thurlow laments how her own story can most easily be told through the men who have rejected or harmed her. Woolf herself both resented and agreed with this.
The specific becomes the general, especially in Thurlow’s anecdotes about her ADHD and rejection sensitivity dysphoria. Her dates with a man who calls the girlfriend who has accused him of abuse, and is being investigated, sees fit to call the ex crazy, despite the idea that Thurlow has “never met a woman who doesn’t feel crazy most of the time”. Another date she tries to please is so unbothered that he leaves an open container of his implied piss next to his bed when she comes over. The need to be liked, instilled in women from birth, is a difficult one to break, and Thurlow’s stories raise audible sounds of recognition from the audience.
River Time refers to Thurlow’s need to return to the river when her mind becomes too loud. In it, she finds hope and inspiration and sense in a mad world, but also potential for escape, as Ophelia and Virginia Woolf once did. She imagines her friend Sophie, who died at nineteen, asking her “what happened to the person you said you were going to be”, and thinks of the blessed relief the river could give her in the simple act of filling her pocket with rocks.
Luckily for us, Thurlow (spoiler alert) lives. Her story is “worth writing, even if no one can read your language”. Unsurprisingly, her language is one of generations of women before her. It is recognizable in the essays of Virginia Woolf, and the songs of Janis Joplin, and the ramblings of reviewers for Fringe Review. In this vulnerable and timely piece, it is easy to look in the river and see yourself looking back.
