Edinburgh Fringe 2025
1, 2, 3. Shit. That’s my OCD.
AM•UART
Genre: Dark Comedy, New Writing, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: The Patter House at Gilded Balloon
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is a new writing solo show from AM•UART about living with OCD and PTSD: I really need to touch that 3 times. 1, 2, 3. F*ck. Did anyone see that? In a world full of ugliness, desperation and people touching you with dirty hands, a young girl tries to hide her OCD symptoms, but it’s in her DNA and the world starts noticing. But relax. It’s a comedy. Fine, tragicomedy. A monologue full of 1,2,3’s, changing from verse to prose and focused on the PTSD of sexual abuse in tandem with OCD traits.
Review
One, two, three. One, two, three. ‘If you say it twice it isn’t real’. Bibi Couceiro’s play runs in threes, as she takes to the stage in her OCD meeting room, cautious and questioning, asking us if anyone would like to volunteer. No? She will talk then. Rhythmical, immediate, and cleverly structured, she lets you into the thought processes around her diagnoses- how she got here, what’s hard or weird or funny – and you see the patterns of the play unfold. The character’s conditions of obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, and second-hand trauma are woven into the pace, style, and structures of the work. Couceiro utilises non-naturalistic storytelling conventions to match OCD thought-patterns and to speak about sexual trauma resulting in PTSD. The latter comes in small pieces – it repeats, is sent away again, or hinted at. The pair help make sense of one another – whether it is the pattern and unexpected poetry of an OCD-brain which can package trauma in a poetic form in which the audience can hear it, or the deep understanding of obsessive compulsive disorder that is facilitated by retracing traumatic events. At times she quiets her own noisy thoughts and sits in the red village hall-style chair with the lights down to listen to a recording of someone else’s story. It’s an assured and beautifully pitched performance – Couceiro portrays raw vulnerability and desire to be understood with skill, pulling the audience into the character’s inner world, letting thoughts flow from her, and expertly navigating changes in tone and content.
There are riffs and rhyming – she loves second-hand when it’s clothes, not so much when it’s trauma. She asks Siri what a thalamus is for those in the audience that don’t know – Bibi’s is ‘fucked – and also bilingual’ (her counting may come out in Portuguese). The play is darkly funny throughout, it perfectly captures that talk-back inner monologue, that joke in the face of desperation. She also tells us, ‘I’m sorry’, reassures us, ‘I am funny’, when things are deemed “too dark” – there’s a thoughtful interaction with ideas about how much other people can hear. She tells us about her doctor’s appointments like she’s thinking it through in real time – “I am not depressed, I do not have depression”, she says at one point, slowing down over the words. Couceiro has a wonderful way of shifting pace, tone and intention in a breath. She wonders whether her new boyfriend will accept her as she is, she’s never told anyone before – would he stay? She talks through her sense of self – she’s the easy-going person that never has problems, she’s three different Bibi’s. The prose-poetry structure allows for narrative but also creates room to muse on wider themes like curiosity or normalcy. It revels in defamiliarisation and drops into fabulous runs of poetry about pills, rage, and the toilet as a sanctuary (but only for sixty seconds because she ‘poops fast’).
In another pattern of three, sexual abuse survivors speak their own stories – Bibi stops and faces away while they speak. It’s a lovely device that the meeting room set-up and her theme of second-hand trauma facilitates. The juxtaposition between the rhythms, rhyming, and movement of Bibi’s story and the quiet naturalism of these voices is tonally lovely. The interaction with the audience and the premise of a first meeting brings us in, we are all here with her and she is introducing herself. If there are latecomers she will whisk them into the play. She tells us at the end that there are also three different ways to finish her story, it depends on the day. The experimental components of this drama are so well done – it is a polished, completed work but it has left room to play. The result is a freshness within the storytelling that meets the character’s, we find her first contemplating speaking of what has happened to her. When Bibi talks to the audience and looks like a person who is constantly calculating and adapting, the actor is also doing this. A little clarity begins to be lost towards the end – a lot of strands have been woven – before a strong ending that closes the performance like a book.
Thoughtful, clever and compelling, it’s gorgeous work about a strong mind trying to make sense of its landscape past and present. I came away remembering not to be scared of witnessing or tackling hard subjects – this play looked straight at them and never felt heavy. A fantastic piece of new writing that shows us how to keep saying things, with style and truthfulness.
