Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Bean vs The Robots: A Solo Show Musical
Midge Lema / Lemabean Productions
Genre: Musical Theatre, Solo Performance, Solo Show
Venue: theSpaceUK
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Bean is trapped inside her spaceship. And now you’re trapped with her. Unfortunately for you, Bean lost her memories and must play sad little songs on her keyboard in order to get them back. While she sings, you start to lose all sense of time. But don’t worry. In space, there’s always time. Or is there? As Bean unravels, she remembers why she, and perhaps you, needed to go to space in the first place. A sci-fi exploration of grief through the funny, wistful and weird eyes of a lost space traveller.
Review
Bean is stranded on a spaceship with little memory of who she is or why she left Earth. With only her keyboard and the ship’s robots for company, she sings in an attempt to recover what she has forgotten. Memories begin to return, revealing the loss that drove her into space. What first looks like an absurd science fiction adventure gradually becomes a story about grief, escape and the difficulty of rebuilding a life after someone important has gone. Well, I say absurd, the clues to the real story are scattered throughout the show, like breadcrumbs in a treasure hunt.
This is a gem of a fringe show, fun and mischievous, ably hosted by solo performer MIdge Lema. The fourth wall is obliterated from the moment we enter and yet we, the audience, willingly re-erect it for the emotionally intense songs that define the show. If the show has any potential for further development it is in the variety of those numbers. It’s a cleverly constructed piece. I savoured the structure that slowly, consciously and cleverly reveals its true intentions by the end.
Our host is also our unhinged storyteller through spoken word, physicality and song. A story of finding a way to be with, to deal with, to cope with and to make sense of grief. How do we move on when we simply can’t? When perhaps we shouldn’t and yet when rational sensibleness says we must? Where can we put it all? What are the clues that lie, not in our normality built in our imagination? What if we need to open space, literally, for that we are forced to bear?
Bean is a hero, a clown and a fellow on that journey. There’s a unique flavour in the construction of this show. I found myself wanting Bean to find a more resolving simplicity yet was also happy to default to whatever this performer has decided upon. We left the venue glad we had entered it. And the show as a whole and its host performer is perhaps its best special effect.
