Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Across five Sundays, we watch as a group of twenty-somethings take part in a clinical drug trial. The comedy explores what happens when five conflicting personalities are forced to engage with each other…without wifi.
Review
In a festival dominated by solo shows, Brainsluts is a lighthearted ensemble piece about a clinical drug trial somewhere in the UK. The play’s quick dialogue and pace keep the story moving with very little downtime. The audience is rarely given a chance to process, but perhaps this is on purpose. As an audience member, I wasn’t left wondering about the fate of our drug takers. Instead, we spend the 70 minutes observing them from afar (as if scientists studying their subjects) and, a bit like a buzz-feed quiz, deciding which one we are.
Each of our four participants is the very encapsulation of their archetype. From the moment they appear on stage, we know who they are. In fact, where many contemporary slice of life plays fail, Brainsluts payed special attention to costuming. From inappropriate socks and shorts to New York mayoral contest merch, the characters showed up on stage as themselves. This created an interesting dynamic between the audience and the piece. We weren’t left wondering what would happen, but, instead, when. This created a sense of anticipation and anxiety not often felt in a comedy.
One of the show’s great strengths is its ability to not cast any characters as the heros or villains of the story. You find yourself falling for, hating, and empathizing for every character at one point or another. The perfectly flawed nature of every character played by the ensemble is precisely what allows us to find ourselves in that examination room.
The play, however, struggles a bit to fill its full run time. Although maintaining a quick pace in its dialogue, which supports the comedy, the play’s overall arc feels unbalanced. The story covers five weeks of the trial, and the script gives a fairly even amount of time to each week. Although this helps the audience understand the monotony of the exercise, it creates instances where it feels like time is being filled that otherwise could be skipped. The doctor provides round up monologues after each day of the study, and this tool could have been leveraged further to tighten up the plot.
