Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Screaming Into The Void
Piece of Work Theatre and New Celts Productions
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Contemporary, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: TheSpace
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Bursting with ideas, Screaming Into The Void offers a substantive analysis of Internet culture, and simultaneously, an entertaining and extremely funny theatrical experience.
Review
Can you monetise screaming? That’s one of the many, many questions (and more than a few screams) packed into this smart and incisive new show by playwright Kira Mason.
The four women of Screaming Into The Void are types, rather than individuals, and that’s by design. Meet “Clean Girl,” “Trad Wife,” “Divine Feminine Goddess,” and “Relatable Queen.” Or, rather, you’ve already met them, if you spend any time at all online.
The pleasures of this show are in the explorations of the archetypes, bolstered by some very funny lines and strong performances from the uniformly talented cast, who succeed in the difficult task of representing categories while avoiding the dangers of one-dimensionality inherent in that mission. It’s also in the sheer volume of ideas, many of them sly and fleeting, fired at the audience in the course of the hour.
These strengths also bring with them their own challenges. The tone of the production shifts around the midpoint, with a sequence that presents the negative self-talk of each character, and this is where fault lines start to appear between a character being an idea versus an individual. It’s also perhaps possible to drill down through layers of ideas too far, to a point at which critiques become unclear and meaning becomes exhausted. There are a lot of critical perspectives here, from feminist and power-based to economic, and – while consistently interesting and intelligent – they don’t always remain unentangled.
Because this is, after all, about the Internet, there’s also a constant tension between meta-level cynicism and authenticity. The script sometimes appears to want to eat its cake and have it, too – for instance, mocking story tropes that conclude that the point was the friends we met along the way, or that the answer was within us the whole time – while eventually settling on a resolution that doesn’t fall far from these notions.
Screaming Into The Void might bewilder audience members who aren’t “very online” themselves, and many of the issues it presents might hold the greatest urgency for those who haven’t solved them merely by aging beyond their reach, but even for those people it offers a fascinating glimpse into what it’s like to navigate womanhood at this point in the twenty-first century. It’s a thought-provoking concept, skillfully executed, and well worth a spot on your viewing lineup.
