Durham Fringe Festival 2026

To Capture the Wildlife

Rocket Theatre Company

Genre: Musical Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Assembly Rooms Theatre

Festival: Durham Fringe Festival

Low Down

Review

The premise behind To Capture the Wildlife is simple, almost deceptively so. After the death of her mum, Morgan has a chance encounter with an unusual girl in a graveyard, and the two strike up a friendship. What follows in front of us is not a neat, tidy arc about healing, thank goodness, because grief doesn’t work like that. Instead, Rocket Theatre Company gives us something far more honest: two young people circling each other, drawn together by loss.

What struck me first, and what stayed with me longest, is how emotionally lived-in this piece feels. There’s a rawness to the writing that doesn’t read as performed grief, the kind you sometimes get in shows that reach for big, sweeping statements about loss because they think that’s what an audience wants. This is quieter and truer than that, and it carries the unmistakable weight of something drawn from real experience.

The friendship at the centre of the piece is the real engine of the show, and it’s handled with a lightness of touch that belies how much weight it’s carrying. Morgan and the unusual girl she meets don’t fall into an easy, symmetrical friendship where both characters are working through matching wounds. There’s an imbalance to it, an unevenness that feels true to how these things actually happen. One of them needs this friendship rather more urgently than the other, at least at first, and watching that balance shift is quietly gripping. It also gives the show room to explore first love without ever making it feel like an afterthought bolted onto the grief plot.

The two threads, loss and longing, are plaited together rather than simply placed side by side, and that’s a harder trick to pull off than it sounds. I found myself rooting for these two the way you root for people you actually know, which tells you everything about how quickly this show earns your affection.

The cast deserve enormous credit for matching that sincerity beat for beat. This is a young company, and the material asks a great deal of them: grief, first love, the confusion of watching someone you care about slip somewhere you can’t follow. They meet that challenge with a sensitivity well beyond their years.

Musically, this is where the show takes its biggest and most interesting risk. The vocals aren’t polished to a West End sheen, and I don’t think they’re meant to be. There’s a rough-edged quality to some of the singing that, rather than undercutting the piece, actually serves it. Grief isn’t polished either. It catches in your throat and comes out wobblier than you’d like. What matters is that the cast never fumble the emotional beats themselves; the roughness sits entirely in the vocal delivery, never in the storytelling, and the two are kept carefully, impressively separate. It’s the kind of imperfection that feels like a deliberate texture rather than a shortcoming, and I suspect a slicker, more conventionally “correct” vocal performance would actually do this material a disservice. That same unpolished honesty carries through into how the songs are sung, and I’d be wary of any future production that tried to smooth it out in the name of polish. Some of these numbers work precisely because they sound like they’re being sung by people still figuring out how to say the words out loud, which, given the subject matter, feels entirely appropriate.

The songs themselves are doing a lot of quiet, unglamorous work too. Rather than pausing the plot for a big set-piece number, the way musicals often do, the music here tends to arrive in the gaps between conversations, filling in the things Morgan and her graveyard companion can’t quite say to each other directly. It’s an approach that suits the material, and it means the musical elements never feel like a genre requirement being ticked off, they feel like a natural extension of characters who are, for entirely understandable reasons, better at singing their feelings than speaking them.

I’ll admit I went into the graveyard with Morgan expecting a nice, gentle little two-hander about friendship, and came out having properly cried, more than once, and not in the polite, single-tear-down-the-cheek way either. I mean the proper, undignified kind, the sort you try to hide behind a programme in the dark and fail at completely. I’m not going to pretend otherwise or bury it in careful reviewer language: this show made me cry, and I loved it. I want that on the record plainly, because it matters, and because shows like this don’t come along every Fringe. There’s something genuinely special happening here, and it’s rare to find a Fringe musical with both this much heart and this much unrealised potential.

If there’s one practical note worth flagging, it’s the staging of the piano. As it currently sits, the instrument eats into the performers’ playing space in a way that occasionally hems in the physical storytelling. I’d love to see it moved off to the side, or hidden altogether, since it isn’t needed for the storytelling itself.

That’s not a criticism, for what it’s worth, it’s a compliment dressed up as a wish list. Rocket Theatre Company have built something with all the makings of success, and something I’m properly glad I got to sit with for an hour.

If you get the chance to catch this cast in this production, don’t let it pass you by. Bring tissues. Possibly bring two.

Published August 3, 2026 by Simon Wilson