Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
An autobiographical tale starring the UK/Canadian immigration labyrinths, with Jennifer Irons caught in the middle in this chaotic, surreal journey exploring colonialism, identity and the search for belonging, featuring German techno pop and the occasional dancing salmon.
Review
There’s an electro disco beat booming out in Assembly George Square’s Studio 2 venue. You know, heavy on the bass and drums and light on the lyrics. Well, repeatable ones anyway as Jennifer Irons, clad from head to toe in the luminescent pink of her childhood hero and Canada’s very own “sweetheart”, Elizabeth Manley, rolls onto the stage. On roller skates. Pink roller skates. With sparkly bits.
It’s instant audience interaction time too, as Irons conducts a poll to explore who is and who is not an “immigrant”. Turns out that the locals are giving this one a wide berth, as only one brave soul admits to being from these parts. So at least she’s preaching to the choir in this autobiographical journey through the incomprehensible algorithms that make up many national immigration processes including, notably, our own. But why the sparkly costume? And what’s with the skates?
Irons is Canadian but had lived happily in the UK for twenty-five years. Until Brexit happened and she started to wonder whether she was still welcome in a land that wanted to cut itself off from the rest of the world, having spent centuries trying to colonise it. So, she decides to return home to Canada. Except she can’t. Canada, like a lot of countries, has a points based immigration system. And she doesn’t have enough points. Not nearly enough. Even though she’s Canadian.
However, if she was an elite sportswoman, then no problem! Step right to the front of the line, ma’am. You’re most welcome to join us. Cue the race to find something that the very antithesis of sporting excellence could master in under a year. That’s what’s with those spangly skates. She has delusions of winning the upcoming world disco roller skating championships (something akin to which does actually exist, I found to my surprise).
Bad Immigrant, created and performed by Irons, is a piece that makes you laugh and angry simultaneously; laughs from the ironic, satirical and dark humour that runs through it; anger from realising that we elected these numpties of politicians and policymakers who haven’t yet worked out that there’s no such thing as an “immigrant”. Go back into the mists of time and you’ll find that we’re all pretty much related to each other in some way, six degrees of separation and all that.
Irons gets this message across without ever lecturing, moralising or veering towards the didactic, using her own situation adroitly to illustrate the iniquities being enacted in our name (allegedly) to keep people out who might actually be an addition to rather than a drain on, our respective economies. Irons’ skills as a raconteur are peerless, “pace and space” ever present in her delivery, with clever use of the dramatic pause before landing punchlines that are on point and funny. She’s also got this uncanny ability to flip the mood in the room pretty much instantly, from the fun to the serious, and back again.
Her storytelling was enhanced by one of the more sophisticated audio-visual displays you’re likely to see at this year’s Fringe, screens carrying a surtitled transcript (useful, but not always essential) and a range of videos showing Irons foray into the skating world, quite a lot of which appeared to involve falling over.
We even ventured into the occasional song, hardly surprising I suppose given the roller disco theme, the highlight of which was a catchy little number with the unforgettable refrain of “hypocrites get on my t-t-t-t-t”…….I’ll leave you to complete that. Chuck in a dancing salmon complete with Attenborough voiceover, a decent helping of absurdity and some gentle roller discoing and it’s the perfect recipe for an hour that’s entertaining and enlightening (if not necessarily in a good way) in equal measure.
Immigration is a major topic in a growing number of countries but surely the issue is about finding the common ground, the common values that create communities. And sports are such communities; Irons has found that in skating; I found it in the two sports I’ve played and followed for half a century. But that doesn’t win votes. Or sell copies of the Daily Mail.
