Brighton Fringe 2026
That’s just the way it’s (un)done
Rowan For Now
Genre: Solo Performance, Solo Play, Solo Show
Venue: The Actors
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Join Rowan For Now as they investigate what it means to outgrow yourself, casting off the skins of rigid narratives and stripping away everything they believed to be true. Through nostalgic imagery, storytelling, lip-sync, humour, and chaos, Rowan uncovers the freedom and grief that surface when normative paradigms start to fall apart.
Born from Rowan’s MA in Queer Performance, we are told this piece keeps growing and changing, just as its creator does. This version stands as both performance and ongoing process, partly ritual, partly revelation. It draws audiences into a journey of untangling and reimagining. “A queer Happily Never After”.
Review
This is an abstract and often surreal performance art and theatre show about sloughing off your skin like a snake, and that not necessarily being a bad thing. We are living in the age of purported transhumanism, where AI is going to transform us and make us better. That’s a pity because transhumanism, along with hyperhumanism, can mean so many other things that are better than that, as we perhaps gain mastery over our own being and see our transformation as a creative and positive act, fraught with danger, but aren’t we here to be dangerous?
Transhumanism often sees the human condition as a problem to solve, whereas hyperhumanism sees it as an opportunity for transformation and enhancement without losing our agency. This is very much explored in this unique piece of performance art, gig theatre.
Much lesser known is hypo-humanism, where diminishing ourselves can become a creative act. Less can be more and, though the sloughing off of the skin can leave us in a seemingly physically lesser state and feeling raw, it opens space for the new and the different. All of these things are mixed together in this startling piece of multi-everything theatre from Rowan.
As we go through the gender expectations that are more or less benevolently foisted upon us by our parents and our socialisation into the world, we gather up the broken shards of constant disillusion and shattering. We are headless princesses and princes and yet we are also head of our own hierarchy of existence if we only choose to accept the agency that is always there.
From clitoral puppetry, to silent clown, to extrovert spoken word, physical theatre blends with dance, bouffon sadness and cheeky stand-up. We have a performer sinking into themselves and then generously and with no small amount of vulnerability sharing it with us, theatrically exploring a potentially endless variety which we can flee from or embrace in equal measure. This audience falls into it willingly.
This is a visually arresting piece in every moment. We are presented with the discomfort of the force-fit of our lives. None of us truly fit and surely we do not need to, and the physical comedy here nails it perfectly. There is clown gesture and occasional look-away shattering realism.
It is often a music-led piece and sometimes it feels a little too sound or music-driven, and the action-response balance needs a look here. If you co-ordinate movement with music, it has to be pitch-perfect unless it is the intention to be slightly off-beam and, as the run progresses, I think that consistency will find itself.
We have a beautiful paradox here that explores the sloughing off of an unwelcome skin and yet the sloughing off itself is welcome.
The theatre here very accomplished, unhinged through self-permission, the serpent takes centre stage and we learn that perhaps we are closer, both individually and as a crowd, to this animal that is often cast as a demon but could actually be the agency of our transformation as well as our experience of individual and collective rapture.
This is a highly inventive piece and you could probably see it again later in its run and find all kinds of new invention infused into it. The vocal miming becomes a micro-genre in itself throughout the show and the audience were whooping with delight at the spectacle, the choice of material and the wonderful caricature. There it gets a bit Brechtian, because many of the chosen voices, sounds and characters make us flinch because there’s a mirror being held up to the tropes of humanity and, of course, we see ourselves in that mirror.
And though this is a shattering piece, often grotesque and intentionally so, it is also sensual, thoroughly entertaining and infused with a sense of fun. We are not the butt of the joke. We, the audience, are the compatriots in this masquerade. And what a masquerade, because the main covering costume is human skin!
Rowan is in the process of becoming, and so becoming can be developmental, where we add to ourselves, finesse and evolve upwards, but equally viable is the hypo-human process of diminishing, at least temporarily lessening ourselves to see what bursts forth in the empty space created.
Silent karaoke, tightly delivered cookery lessons, stand-up, singing and poetry all tussle on the stage with stillness in movement, and pure direct theatrical performance with the fourth wall up and down like a yo-yo on Viagra.
I loved every minute of this, as did the audience. Some of the pacing and repetitiveness in the snake metaphor does need a bit of finessing but overall this is a rich buffet of theatre and performance as it should be, with a narrative that doesn’t respect linearity but doesn’t abandon it completely either. There is abstraction in this performance but it has threads of recognisable story, and where that could become a problem, where the show might not know whether it is one thing or the other, in this case it is one thing and the other, both, either and more. It is not a problem at all, it is a virtue.
Admit it, we could all benefit from sloughing off a skin now and then. But next time you do, don’t leave there on the ground. Hang it on your washing line and tell it thank you.
This is pure fringe treasure. This is what happens when you break things to see what emerges. And then you don’t mend them, you just behold the transformation. We were blessed to behold it too.
