Brighton Fringe 2026
7-7-7
Colin Rayner
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Experimental, Movement, Solo Show, Theatre
Venue: The Actors Theatre
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
A one-man show that makes you question whether you’re watching theatre or accidentally joined a cult.
Review
7-7-7 Created and Performed by Colin Rayner
A red rotary phone sits isolated under a spotlight. The intimate setting of The Actors Theatre is the perfect home for what follows. The sound design is cinematic and faintly eerie. Before anything has happened, before anyone has spoken, the atmosphere already feels suspended somewhere between theatre, memory and psychological horror. It’s a bold opening gambit, and 7-7-7 earns it.
This is a darkly funny and psychologically disorienting one-man performance exploring evil, free will, ritual and the frightening possibility that none of us are truly in control of who we become. It is also very clearly not for everyone. If you’re looking for narrative resolution, emotional comfort or a straightforward evening out, this will likely alienate you. That is simply the nature of what this piece is trying to do, and it does it with remarkable precision.
Even before stepping on stage, Rayner is already inhabiting the world of the piece, sitting quietly amongst the audience in a state visibly different from the person briefly encountered after the show. The transformation is total. When the phone rings and he hesitates before answering it, caught somewhere between fear and temptation, the audience already understands that picking up the receiver means crossing into something irreversible.
What follows is fragmented but emotionally coherent, with themes and revelations slowly rearranging themselves in retrospect. What initially appears playful and chaotic gradually reveals darker foundations underneath. The piece repeatedly returns to the question of where evil comes from and whether human beings are truly responsible for who they become, yet never becomes preachy or self-important. Humour is deployed constantly and intelligently, allowing the audience to stay engaged even as the material grows increasingly disturbing.
At times Rayner shifts between therapist and patient so fluidly the two identities collapse into one another. Audience participation is handled with particular skill. During one sequence involving guided breathing and ritual-like exercises, the audience obediently follows instructions to lower their gaze, only to realise moments later that this solemn collective action has served partly as cover for the therapist casually taking cocaine. The reveal lands perfectly: funny, absurd and slightly alarming.
Rayner’s physical performance is extraordinary. Movements are sharp, twitching and restless, almost chemically overstimulated, as if the body cannot contain the speed of thought moving through it. The use of space is clearly highly constructed, but the performance never feels choreographed. It simply feels real.
The recurring cycle of rebirths becomes one of the strongest structural elements of the piece. Rayner repeatedly embodies different lives and different forms of violence: a seemingly good man overtaken by murderous thoughts, a person killing in war, another killing for ideology. These transitions are executed with remarkable physical and emotional precision, exploring the uncomfortable possibility that evil may not belong exclusively to monsters but exist somewhere within ordinary human beings and ordinary circumstances.
One sequence involving the character’s father suddenly grounds the philosophical exploration in something painfully human. A father emotionally opens up for perhaps the first time, telling his son “no matter what happens, I love you”, before the scene violently shifts into something deeply unsettling. The production repeatedly destabilises the audience in this way, moving from humour to intimacy to horror within moments. Lighting and sound continuously reshape the space, so that at certain points the performance feels less like theatre and more like witnessing a ritual, a possession, or fragments of a film unfolding live. The effect induces a real vertigo, the unsettling possibility that the border between theatre and ritual has quietly dissolved, and that whatever is being summoned on stage, you have been helping to summon it.
Just as the intensity threatens to become overwhelming, the piece undercuts itself with humour, self-awareness and absurdity. Even moments of near-mystical transformation are punctured with jokes at exactly the right time.
7-7-7 is an intense, unsettling and genuinely impressive piece of work. It will not suit every temperament, and it makes no apology for that. Beneath the cocaine-fuelled therapist, the philosophical spirals and the emotional fragmentation lies a disciplined, carefully executed performance that fully commits to its own logic, and trusts the audience to keep up.
