Edinburgh Fringe 2025

Rugburn

Full Spiral Productions (United States)

Genre: Drama, LGBT Theatre, Musical Theatre, Theatre

Venue: theatre at C ARTS | C venues | C alto

Festival: Edinburgh Fringe

Low Down

Review

Plays don’t get much more American than Rugburn, nor much slicker, well-crafted or so dynamically performed. Rampant capitalism, show tunes, excesses in celebrity-worship, riches, sex, business betrayal and being Californian plus many more archetypal tropes of rich life in the USA. Talking of capitalism, the producers of this play have spent a shed load on publicity, including huge posters I have been seeing all around Edinburgh. The night I saw it, there were just 20 people in the audience, which, despite having a resonance with one of the themes in the play, this drama certainly deserves to be seen by bigger audiences.

The play begins with Matty our hero, bare-arsed in leather harness and jockstrap with a panda hood on running around screaming regret at what he has just done. We do not find out what that is until the very end of the play. In between posing this mystery and answering it, there are two main storylines; one following our hero Matty’s career and the other following his relationship with Kevin, but they are intertwined storylines because Kevin and Matty are business partners as well as life partners. There are very entertaining B and C storylines. One follows Matty’s hysterical mother and her convulsing dog, with her trying to organise everyone in the family. Another is a hilarious storyline about how Eileen and Davidson, Matty’s accountant and her husband, are trying to limit the financial and reputational damage to Matty and save his soul with some very unorthodox but very Californian practices, respectively. There’s nothing particularly new in the business storyline with a quick rise in riches after a huge investment going to the heads of the company owners who make unwise, selfish choices.

Mat Sanders is a consummate performer; a skilled actor and a very impressive singer with a voice worthy of a Broadway musical. He’s a great mover too. The full package. One can’t fault his delivery of this breakneck speed show that machine guns us with scene after scene, packed with cleverly witty, meticulously composed quips and descriptions of people, events and places in his crazy Californian interior-designer-to-the-stars life. He jumps us expertly back and forward in time and location from his childhood to his collapsing company to his magazine and TV exposure and more. It is directed by Telly Kousakis with such velocity that the hour shoots by incredibly quickly, but in a monotone. Some variety in pace, energy and emotional level would have been welcome from the director because a capable actor like Sanders could certainly deliver a wider range of registers, paces, tones and emotions.

Matty and Kevin are in an open relationship and we get graphic and hilarious descriptions of what Matty gets up to sexually and with just how many. But then we learn that it is partly self-punishment because he sees himself as a worthless piece of shit. And I fear the audience does too. I found Matty a very unsympathetic, unlikeable character and it is a brave drama that has you not rooting for the hero’s salvation and escape from disaster. I won’t spoil the climax of the play (or should I say climaxes) but his ultimate choice of how to deal with his own business and relationship destruction is for him a sexually extreme choice, explained in graphic detail, that a gay slut like me was not fazed by. But, the night I saw it, at least some of the straight women in the audience left visibly shocked and disturbed. That’s not a problem for me, I think it is important that theatre depicts the realities of many different lives, it would just be nice once in a while to have promiscuous gay sex and open relationships portrayed as something that can also contribute to a life-enhancing, non-destructive existence. But that’s not the aim of Rugburn.

Published August 14, 2025 by Turan Ali