Edinburgh Fringe 2025
How to Drink a Glass of Water
Trevor Lock
Genre: Comedy, Solo Performance, Spoken Word
Venue: Venue: Hoot 5 @ The Apex Venue 108
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Poetry, Comedy, Lists and Questions – Trevor Lock puts down a carpet and whips it out from under your feet. A million thoughts in one hour that you wish you had written down to contemplate at your leisure.
Review
In a small cold venue we sit on seats… “Please choose a seat with a pen and paper on it,” we are advised by Trevor, who is in the room, not that he has much choice in that there is only a tiny space for him with a stool, a steep metal lectern, a microphone. Nowhere to put his glass of water. There are six of us and it is his first show of this run and the first of his new format. Apparently, he is quite well known for his other shows. I am tempted to go find out what they are like.
Trevor brings you in gently, greeting us personally, asking us to use the pen and paper to write, in capital letters, a compliment to someone in the room. He reads those out at the end. But between then and now, we are put through the wringer. He confidently asks us to put our hand up if we have ever… watches our reactions, asks for clarification and examples. One audience member discloses something sad, another goes, “I’m sorry, mate.” Trevor acknowledges the empathy and praises it. Slowly but surely, the ‘put your hand up’ questions get deeper and more scary. We soon learn not to jump the gun and put up a hand before he has finished the thought progression. Quickly aborting your original false sense of security in gentle comedy, you follow him as he embarks on a deeply philosophical and cringe worthy, stopping you in your thoughts, soul baring journey. Eventually, the examples become so densely deep that it becomes hard to listen to the next one as you are still trying to unravel the previous.
There are more strands to this show. Next, he asks us to give him letters from the alphabet and reads the definitions of words from his dictionary. These are funny, deadpan, and often nihilistic, always well observed. Beautiful is the section on All the World’s a Stage, where Trevor enlightens us with a long list of all the world is… something else, and again, his thoughts are so spot on and often sad that they should be available in book or poetry form, just so you can spend more time contemplating them.
The last section of the show is the most stunning: he imagines life flashing before his eyes before he dies and, by accident, a spelling mistake has crept into the matrix and it is ‘I was’ instead of ‘I saw’. And the things he ‘was’ simply take your breath away. No spoiler alerts, listen out for the elephant gun. Like his mum says: why aren’t you on television?
