Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Find Me by Olwen Wymark
Parker and Snell Theatre Company
Genre: Theatre
Venue: Space @ The Mile
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is the story of Verity who set a chair on fire in the 1970s and ended up being prosecuted for it and we have a degree of outrage as to why such a trivial thing should end up with such a draconian response. Her incarceration at a number of facilities shows the state and her family’s inability to handle or deal with her challenging behaviour. The final message is not to condemn or to endorse how she behaved, but to condemn and refuse to endorse the network designed to help, that is as helpless and useless as Verity’s own coping mechanisms.
Review
As with previous years, this original work challenges a young cast, but Parker and Snell raise their game to match it. Thie delivery of the spoken words and the silences when words were not enough, dealt with a truly heart-breaking story with sensitivity and outrage in equal measure. No punches were pulled and all sides given an airing, with heavy emphasis on the family and their struggles.
This Manx-based theatre company for young people has once again brought a very strong story as a platform but not rested upon their laurels. It is a very difficult topic and one that they manage with incredible skill.
The story is of an unruly child who her family failed to find a method of combining the loving, managing and keeping her safe whilst her symptoms ran riot. As somebody who works within the childcare sector during my day job, this is something I hear and see constantly. A lot of this chimed with my experience.
I had to consistently remind myself that this was a young company because the depth of performance was such, especially from the father, worked so well – he was tight lipped and stiff upper lipped with all things crossed hoping for a better outcome, after the phase out of which she would eventually grow: she never did. The young actor playing Verity, did so with a fantastic sense of understanding as you saw the combination of naïveté, confidence, openness, overreaching ambition and discovering the fear that comes from your own limitations and then acting out because you have rubbed right up against that. Costume was good and I liked the use of lighting. A couple of cues were a little late but tolerably so.
Sight lines were a bit of an issue, and it felt like it had been directed for one space then moved here. I also felt that having the cast at the side of the stage rather than on stage throughout was a miss. Had they been on stage throughout playing the various voices and characters they could have been lit below the chin nose so that what you got was a sense of a faceless community abandoning this family rather than a disembodied voice that you just turned around and saw standing in the corner somewhere.
Having said that the direction was sound.
This was a tough watch but a welcome challenge for us all – dealing with the people who don’t fit, and how we make ourselves fit round them to give them the love and understanding they have a right to have so that they can throve and not be forgotten in some institution. Heavy material for a young cast – but handled excellently.
