Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Single Use
Orange Squeeze Theatre
Genre: New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Ella, the alter ego of Verity Mullan, is a natural procrastinator, addicted to Deliveroo and other forms of convenience, unwilling to accept responsibility but desperately seeking to do the right thing. Anything. Then a text arrives from Malaysia, asking her to stop dumping her rubbish in their ocean. Therein begins her quest to understand just what happens when she puts out the bin each week.
Review
Bunker Three at the Pleasance is both intimate and comfortable, surely an oxymoron for a Fringe venue? There’s barely room to swing even a tiny feline on this small stage but it comes replete with a large green dustbin, a black stool and a small set of steps, each of which play a prominent role in Single Use, an interesting take on the curse of consumer societies’ increasing reliance on single use items, with the focus here being on plastics.
The brainchild of writer/performer Verity Mullan and director/co-creator Emma Beth Jones, Single Use uses classic nudge techniques to draw its audience’s attention to the hole we’ve potentially dug for ourselves by simply acquiring and/or consuming too much stuff.
Fox On The Run by Sweet (remember them?) is playing on loop as Mullan’s alter ego, Ella, staggers on stage with a large bag of, erm, plastic dominated recycling. Ella is your archetypal procrastinator – never do now what you can put off indefinitely – paying some bills, learning to cook, paying more bills, getting sustainable employment, paying even more bills. Ella’s the sort of girl that used to be indecisive, but now she’s just not sure. You get the picture.
Kneeling comfortably on the floor, Ella regales her attentive audience with her life’s many and varied travails, munching contentedly on a packet of crisps from, ahem, a single use, foil lined, non-recyclable packet. It’s gently amusing, observational comedy designed to help the audience identify with her, her friends and colleagues and the premise of the show itself.
The audience? Well, a scattering of the worried well, the grey-haired and concerned and the young and probably confused. With rather an abundance of single use, plastic drinks cups between them – yep, the sort that end up floating to shore in places like Malaysia. Clearly this Sunday lunchtime lot are prime candidates for a planet saving homily or two.
Mullan is an engaging storyteller and an actor with a strong grasp of character development and characterisation – just as well really given that she plays all the stage roles and provided most of the voiceovers as well. Her expressive face (particularly her eyes) allow her to switch effortlessly between Alan, her allotment owning muse, Gerry, her makeover obsessed boss, Abby, the flatmate/landlord to whom she’s in increasing levels of debt, her alter ego and a few more besides. She’s particularly adept at holding conversations with imaginary people and uses silence to good effect throughout, giving the audience time to reflect and herself time to regroup.
And her mime sequence when Alan lures her into a transcendental meditation session was excruciatingly amusing, although you didn’t want to laugh out loud for fear of breaking the silence. A shout out, too, for the hard-working techie on sound/lights. My reviewing vantage point allowed me to follow what was an extremely long cue list that required a lot of split second timing to support what was happening on set. Top marks for delivery on that element of the piece.
So far, so good. But the “nudge” technique being deployed here missed the target by understating the issue, causing the show to lack a little in terms of substance and depth. Recycling is an urban myth. Around 40% of the 400 million tonnes of annual plastic production is single use. Less than 10% is recycled. Do the maths. That’s a lot of wasted resource. This is a complex problem that will need a complex solution, at the core of which has to be appropriate social, economic and commercial incentives (I write as an erstwhile economist).
However, this is a good show, one that attempts to highlight a growing societal problem using storytelling that avoids being didactic or moralising but tries to nudge those single use, plastic cup carrying audience members towards better habits. It’s well scripted and acted, resulting in most of the audience staying with Mullan most of the time and there was genuine audience appreciation as the story reached its touching, heartfelt conclusion.
But will it make a difference? And do enough people care enough? Judging by the tsunami of plastic related detritus that greeted me as I crossed the streets of Edinburgh en route to my next venue, we’ve a way to go yet. Mullan might be running this one for a while.
