Edinburgh Fringe 2025
A Play About Feet
Find Your Feet Theatre company
Venue: theSpace @ Venue 45
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Nominally a dark comedy about ambition, relationships and terrible decisions, A Play About Feet’s undercurrent of frustration as you try to stay afloat in a dead-end job screams at you so loudly that it hurts.
Review
Want to know the big issues that are going to bite politicians and policymakers on the backside in the course of the next few years? Then spend time at the Fringe watching plays where young theatre companies showcase new writing in small, sometimes difficult to locate venues. Listen to what they’re saying. And then do something.
Find Your Feet Theatre company’s A Play About Feet is one such work. Nominally a dark comedy about ambition, relationships and terrible decisions, its pervading undercurrent of frustration at the iniquity of trying to stay afloat as a wage slave in a dead-end job screams at you so loudly that it hurts.
There’s a woman lying on a crumpled bed, tossing and turning as she tries to sleep. Meet Her, stuck in that job to nowhere, dating Him, a cheating, useless boyfriend and watch her life spiral into chaos faster than water flows down the plughole as poor decisions badly executed take Her on a journey to a dark nadir.
She’s searching for direction as, one by one, she breaks every relationship that’s a part of her life, despite everyone around her trying every way they can to help. And failing. Badly. Cue Her’s ill-judged foray into OnlyFans in a bid to monetise, well, her feet.
This is a fast paced, absurdist piece of theatre that on the surface is sharp and hilarious. But it’s also worryingly, horribly relatable as its series of concisely executed scenes expose the vicissitudes of 21st century life, culminating in a denouement that is as chilling as it is terrifying, its climatic outburst bringing unfiltered ire, that many people perhaps might feel but seldom express, in a release of repressed rage. A denouement that created complete silence, no doubt the effect it intended.
There’s so much to admire in this piece. The quality of acting for a start. It’s a five strong piece with four playing roles that support the pivotal character, Her, where Alix Lander gave a blistering, bravura performance from start to finish. Articulation, emotion, movement and characterisation were each absolutely perfect. Gus McQuillen was plausible as Him (Her’s misogynistic cheat of a boyfriend); Kate Horobin alternately supportive and chiding as Her’s sister; Abbie Cushing the epitomy of Her’s BFF; and Jack Watts left little to the imagination as the wonderfully wacky Tony, Her’s find on Tindr under the sobriquet Lover666.
Credit is also due in equal measure to Josie Beer for creating a tight script that mixes humour (dark and light) with the poignancy, pathos, desperation, depression and devastation felt by many young people as they struggle to plot a path through life.
Costumes were more than just the usual prosaic. Using two, three or four boiler suited characters as valets, maids, scene shifters, props handlers and a range of other tasks was a clever piece of staging. Task complete? Need to change character and costume? Simple, just strip down the top of the boiler suit and reveal a new character costume beneath. And this being a play about feet, we saw ten of them as the cast played the whole thing, erm, barefoot. Clever!
A lot of thought has also gone into choreographing what is a complex piece of theatre to host in a relatively tight space, complete with large bed, chairs, table and the associated detritus that often populates young people’s rental flats. Hats off, then, to Esme Sharpington’s direction for her acute sense of the possible and plausible.
Light and fluffy this ain’t. But if you’re looking for writing that will make you think that comes with acting that’s right out of the top drawer, A Play About Feet is the one to head for. Highly recommended.
