Edinburgh Fringe 2025

Use Your Words!

Karen Eleanor Wight and Rodney Umble

Genre: Comedy, Physical Theatre, Theatre

Venue: theSpace @ Niddry Street

Festival: Edinburgh Fringe

Low Down

Review

My daughter recently took delivery of a very small, smelly and noisy object.  She and her husband, being logical scientists, planned for this to the “nth” degree.  Spreadsheets were created for every activity – wake, feed, sleep, clean, repeat.   Then he arrived.  Cue chaos.

If they’d seen Karen Eleanor Wight’s brilliant one act play, Use Your Words, they could have saved themselves all that effort and spent the time more usefully in the pub, celebrating their last days of freedom.  And having money.

Use Your Words has been more than a decade in gestation and is based around Wight’s motherhood experience bringing up her son and daughter, both of whom formed part of the backstage team here.  Consisting of five word free scenes – well, almost word free – this two hander focuses on the challenges of dealing with a human whose demands are in inverse proportion to its size.  We meet the “baby”, funnily enough, at the beginning, shortly after its birth and stagger through the many and rapid stages of  its development to toddlerhood at about two and a half.

Centre stage throughout is the expressive, charismatic Wight who mimes her interactions with the baby, the baby itself (thankfully) and most of the many and varied props that are deployed throughout this weirdly fascinating and relatable piece of, well…..is it theatre, comedy, dance, mime or what?  Maybe it’s all of the above.

Not quite centre stage but nonetheless an absolutely pivotal part of the performance is a man on a chair, draped with a clipboard, holding a tiny trumpet.  Around his feet are scattered a wide variety of interesting, mainly percussive objects.  Meet the innovative Rodney Umble, the voice to Wight throughout, using an eclectic range of instruments and objects, including said trumpet, mouth organ, kitchen sieve, tambourine, football rattle, bottle with an object in it, kazoo, a cardboard box and quite a few more besides.  Oh, and a bell to signal a scene change.  And the clipboard?  A very clever signposting device.

You name it, Wight mimes it.  Back home with the newborn and it’s a routine of feeding, nappy changing, more feeding, rocking junior to sleep, feeding whilst dancing around the room (social worker alert!!), trying to get junior to finally nod off………you get the picture.

Then we’re 57 days in and sleep deprivation is full on – the mother’s not the little mite’s.  Cue scenes of mother randomly falling asleep, tip-toeing from the nursery having carefully settled the squawker, settling down for a well earned kip when…….do I really need to tell you what happens next?  Every parent has been there, got the T shirt.  And the bags under the eyes.

The remaining scenes focus on six months, a year in and then that challenging period around toddlerdom with equal creativity and humour in terms of their depiction by Wight, in the support provided by the very expressive Umble, together with some superbly timed interjections from our unseen young person.  The denouement is wonderfully tender and beautifully delivered, a fitting climax to a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of performing art.

Wight’s seemingly infinitely elastic body works well with her expressive face and her hands, oh, those hands, they are so supple, so demonstrative that words really are superfluous – you know exactly what she’s doing, every time.  It’s a tour de force of mime and physical theatre, the delicacy of her movement redolent at times of Oliver Hardy – go check it out if you doubt my comparison.

Umble’s performance is equally striking.  Expressive, creative, inspired, he is so effective as the voice of the mother that you can “hear” what she’s saying.  Or thinking. And quite how someone can play “Yakety Sax” on a kazoo whilst moving around a dark stage picking up props and helping set the next scene beats me.  Priceless.

This is an absolute hidden gem of a piece of theatre, a unique take on the perils of parenthood.  The attention to every little detail, the soundscape, the lighting, the staging, the choreography, the mime, the expression, the silliness, the clowning, the concept, the whole damn thing.  Except that it isn’t really hidden, given that it’s at theSpace Niddry Street’s capacious Upper theatre.  The only thing missing was the audience.

My distant memories of bringing up children was that the first ten years were hard work, then it got very expensive.  Use Your Words is uncannily relatable, something that any parent would recognise in an instant.  And take your kids too, so they can see at first hand just what they’ve done to you, why you have those bags under your eyes and why you are permanently skint.

Published August 20, 2025 by Tim Wilcock