Brighton Fringe 2026
Low Down
There are moments, rare, fleeting , when someone looks at you and says, “I know you,” and something in you recognises the truth of it. Not as fact, but as feeling. A sense that connection might exist beneath language, beneath logic — in a space we can only approach through image, symbol and metaphor. It is an idea that sits somewhere close to Carl Jung collective unconscious: that we are linked by patterns deeper than our individual lives.
Building on its programme’s promise of myth and fractured time, Fate Train, written and directed by the sibling duo Holly Hopkins and Max Hopkins, leans into this territory, weaving Norse gods and the modern day into a surreal landscape where time, memory and self begin to blur. It positions itself as both “powerfully poetic” and “unflinchingly human,” inviting the audience into a space where grief is refracted through mythic form.
Like a haiku by Matsuo Bashō, “old pond / frog jumps in / water / sound” , the piece understands that words are not merely descriptive, but generative. They conjure worlds.
Review
At the outset, language is scattered, almost violently: words are thrown, spat into the air, as if casting spells. From this apparent chaos, meaning gathers. Story emerges not as something fixed, but as something summoned.
This is, at its core, a play about grief, about how we attempt to let go when real life comes crashing in, and how, in that rupture, even fate itself begins to challenge our need for certainty. Based on a true story of loss, Hopkins and Hopkins have created a work that feels necessary, a story that insists on being told, not to resolve grief, but to give it form and presence. In a note accompanying the production, they describe the work as an exploration of how we carry grief, and how storytelling allows pain to become something shared , a private experience translated into something that can be witnessed and held.
In the intimacy of a black box theatre, the audience is met with a simple but quietly devastating image: a stack of cardboard boxes. Ordinary, functional, yet loaded with absence, they hold clothes and the remnants of a shared life. Lydia’s name is marked across them, a small detail that lands with weight. Everything that once signified presence is now reduced to containment, held in suspension between what was and what must come next.
Lydia has only just moved in with Dawn when she is suddenly taken away. What remains is not closure, but residue. As Dawn sifts through these fragments, the act becomes something more than practical , it edges into ritual, an attempt to impose order on what resists understanding. In Dawn’s relationship with Lydia, there is a sense of a deeper, more emotionally open connection. A brief reference to her ex-partner Darren offers a quiet contrast, hinting at a more limited dynamic shaped by familiar masculine stereotypes. It’s a light touch, but one that gestures toward shifting ideas around connection and emotional depth.
It is within this searching that a book on Norse mythology is uncovered not as decoration, but as a threshold.
From this moment, the shift is palpable. The book does not introduce myth; it activates it. Dawn, and the audience with them, are drawn downward into the well, into a space where narrative loosens and image takes hold. The domestic world of boxes does not disappear, but deepens, revealing itself as the surface of something far less stable. What unfolds is not an escape from reality, but a descent into its underlying structures, where grief resists resolution and instead demands to be inhabited.
Within this framework, the line “bodies are dirt” lands with force. Rather than reductive, it echoes a cosmology in which human life and the earth are continuous, where to return to the ground is not an ending, but a reabsorption into origin. In this light, grief is not an interruption of life but part of its cycle: a descent into the same material from which connection, memory and identity are formed.
Dawn’s impulse is to escape, to board a train, to move forward, to outrun the past. Yet the production resists this forward motion. Time fragments. Narrative loops. The thread of meaning, once intact, has been severed.
Crucially, the piece operates across two distinct theatrical languages. On one level, there is a naturalistic, conversational register, the recognisable world of relationships and emotional exchange. Alongside this runs a more stylised mode, drawing on an Eastern-influenced performance language, where gesture, rhythm and spatial composition carry as much meaning as text.
At the same time, the work draws whether consciously or through process on older, classical structures that recur across cultures. The presence of the chorus evokes not only Norse mythology, but the function of the Greek chorus: a mediating force that observes, comments, and confronts. The narrative carries echoes of retribution drama, in which a central figure attempts to evade consequence, only to be brought into confrontation with forces that cannot be denied. Here, Dawn’s desire to escape is continually checked by figures who operate as gatekeepers not moral arbiters, but embodiments of inevitability.
The staging reflects this economy. Working within a black box, the production aligns with a principle akin to Empty Space where environment is conjured through word, gesture and action. Objects are minimal but charged; space is fluid, continually redefined by the performers. At key moments, sticks are used to suggest the shifting architecture of the train and, more intriguingly, the opening of thresholds .With simple, precise gestures, they evoke sliding doors that seem to part into another dimension, hinting at a portal rather than a fixed location. The effect is understated but evocative, allowing the audience to complete the image, with a faint echo of familiar cinematic language handled with restraint.
Here, the chorus , Urd (Salvador Barnett), Verdandi (Robyn Ives) and Skuld (Ve Asha) , becomes the living architecture of fate, emerging from the same mythic terrain as the well itself. If the well represents depth, memory and the submerged unconscious, then these figures are its agents shaping what rises, what remains, and what must be let go.
Their entrances, marked by the beat of a drum, carry both dramatic and structural weight. The rhythm does more than announce their presence it introduces time as a perceptible force, something counted, measured, and yet unstable. The pulse suggests order, but what follows often disrupts it, reinforcing the idea that time within the piece is not fixed, but relative.
Each carries a distinct function. Urd holds the past : memory, trace, what has been woven. Verdandi inhabits the present , the act of becoming, the thread as it is spun and sustained. Skuld leans toward the future, what is owed, what must be resolved, the inevitable severing of the line. Together, they articulate time not as linear progression, but as something simultaneous, fractured and continually negotiated.
The three performers embody these roles with distinct yet interwoven energies, bound by what feels like an invisible thread , an umbilical line connecting past, present and future. Barnett’s Urd carries a mercurial, almost trickster-like presence, bringing a restless intelligence to the unfolding pattern. Ives’ Verdandi embodies immediacy, her delivery grounded and precise. Asha’s Skuld moves with a more volatile energy, resisting stillness and leaning into momentum. The future, in her hands, is not calm or predetermined, but active, something that presses in, unsettles, and demands to be faced.
Together, they form a cohesive chorus that operates beyond human psychology. They are not driven by emotion, but by function , shaping, sustaining and resolving the thread of life, yet this order is not fixed. At times, their roles fracture; voices overlap, tensions emerge, and a sense of anarchy takes hold. Fate here is not seamless, but volatile, capable of confusion as much as clarity.
There remains further potential to deepen the chorus’s relationship to time itself. If time within the piece is already fractured, then the chorus as its agents could more fully embody this by manipulating tempo and duration in a more radical way. A more pronounced use of stillness, suspension, slow-motion and freeze could heighten the contrast between the naturalistic and mythic worlds. Practices found in Butoh demonstrate how the stretching or collapsing of time through the body can shift perception, allowing the chorus not only to mark time, but to distort it.
What emerges overall is a strong and intelligently conceived piece of theatre, in which contrasting performance languages are woven together with clarity and ambition. The integration is fluid, allowing the audience to move between narrative and abstraction without losing the emotional thread.
At the centre of the piece, Catie Ridewood delivers a mature and compelling performance as Dawn, carrying the emotional and structural weight of the journey with assurance. Her portrayal moves convincingly through a full gamut of human emotion, anchoring the more abstract elements of the production in lived experience and emotional truth.
Opposite, Max Hopkins’ Jules provides a necessary counterbalance, grounding the work in a recognisable world.
It is also important to recognise the context in which work like Fate Train is made. The BN1 Arts Centre Graduate Development Scheme offers emerging artists the space and support to develop ambitious new work. At a time when support for the arts is increasingly fragile, spaces like this do more than host performance . They make it possible.
The result is a piece that does not seek to resolve grief, but to inhabit it to trace its contours, its repetitions, its quiet ruptures. Fate Train understands that loss is not something we move beyond, but something we learn to carry.
In the end, the boxes remain. The words settle. The thread stretches, trembles, and is held if only for a moment — between those who stay and those who are gone. And in that space, the production offers something rare: not answers, but recognition.
This is a piece that deserves to be seen, not only for what it achieves, but for what it reveals about how we live with loss, and how theatre can give shape to what we struggle to name.
Productions like this are never the work of a single voice. Theatre is a collaborative act, one that builds not only performance but a range of shared creative and social skills. Fate Train, presented by Folks Theatre, is supported by a dedicated team: assistant director Fred Wigg (he/him), Melanie Zaft (costume and props, she/her), stage manager Kathrine Daisy (she/her), and lighting designer Tom Ross (he/him). Their combined work forms the foundation of the piece and points toward a production and a company with clear potential to grow.
I highly recommend this show !
