Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Float
F-Bomb Theatre
Genre: Feminist Theatre, LGBTQ+, One Person Show, Queer Theatre, Solo Performance
Venue: Gilded Balloon
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A beautifully crafted hour long monologue about pregnancy loss and grief, all through the eyes of an astronaut lost in space.
Review
If Elton John has taught us anything, it’s that it’s lonely out in space. And space, indeed, is the setting of Indra Wilson’s new one-person show about grief, loss, and the loneliness that comes with losing someone that you never had the chance to meet after all. A beautifully crafted hourlong monologue, we follow Wilson as they recount their pregnancy journey through the guise of an astronaut preparing for space, complete with a fully kitted out space suit – from a childhood fascination with Astronaut Barbie to jetting off, deep into the unknown – with all the euphoric highs and catastrophic lows that follow.
A tender look at the pregnancy journey through a young, queer perspective – after all, how do you reckon with something so unexpected, when all your friends are so desperately trying to avoid it? – the hour feels like an extended, gentle hug. And when the lights come up, Indra kindly reminds us of how this is a journey that everyone has been through, and to just take a moment to remember those in our lives that we might be missing. Grief, after all, never really goes away. There’s a sense of a collective journey both within the story and within the audience – one fairly small on our viewing, and one that would deserve to be much bigger – and as we stumble out into the sunlight, there’s a feeling of shared experience as we all consider the important people in our own stories.
The journey of grief really is like the journey of an astronaut, a metaphor that Wilson’s autobiographical show carries wonderfully. Part of the Made in Scotland showcase and produced by F-Bomb Theatre, Float is a well-written, seamless hour of theatre, and offers a different perspective on the emotional landscapes of pregnancy than the ones we have become accustomed to – as of writing, Float has already won a Bragi Award this Fringe, and I would expect it to win many more. Wilson’s story is intended to help reframe the narrative surrounding pregnancy and grief, and indeed, a portion of every ticket sold goes towards helping others who are experiencing baby loss in Scotland.
