Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Confessions of a Mulatto Love Child
Bellina Logan
Genre: Autobiography, Dark Comedy, Solo Show
Venue: Zoo Venues Southside
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Confessions of a Mulatto Love Child is a solo storytelling show by Bellina Logan. Raised by her acerbic, larger-than-life English mother, Bellina grows up on outrageous stories, cultural collisions, and the relentless command to ‘remember your life.’ As her mother’s memory fades, the roles reverse and remembering becomes an act of love.
Review
Confessions Of A Mulatto Love Child is Bellina Logan’s autobiographical solo show, taking us on a journey through her childhood with an English mother (a writer, painter and socialite), a largely absent Black father, and a Scottish nanny. It opens with the conflicting accounts of her conception according to her parents, then moves through birth and a childhood spent growing up biracial in a largely white community, being repeatedly uprooted as her mother shuttled the family between Los Angeles, New York, London and Spain before finally coming to ground in New York, once she realised Bellina needed some stability to finish high school.
Gradually the story shifts from Bellina’s own childhood memories to a celebration of her mother’s increasingly eccentric later years in New York, before finally addressing the difficult onset of dementia and the need to relocate her mother to be near Bellina, her husband and daughter in LA, where she spent her final days.
Bellina grows up being told by her mother, Averil, to ‘remember your life’. The instruction takes on a devastating new significance when Averil begins showing signs of Alzheimer’s. As phone calls are forgotten and memories disappear, their roles gradually reverse, with Bellina becoming her mother’s carer and keeper of her history. Logan captures with real precision the frantic, exhausting nature of being an in-between carer – responsible for a failing parent on one hand and a lively, growing child on the other. She explores the particular pain of losing someone slowly, in pieces, while they’re still there. It is not only an emotional loss, Logan highlights the very real difficulties that arise when there’s no power of attorney (or US equivalent) in place with a parent who refuses to sign something important
Logan brings it all to life with incredible energy, panache and skill. Her command of accents and the physical attributes of each of her many characters is extraordinary, her storytelling exceptional – Betty was my favourite, drawn through the tiniest details that somehow summed up the whole person. There is laughter throughout, even as she faces the terrifying difficulties presented by dementia.
The programme describes Averil as larger than life, and every story bears that out; by the finish you feel you have met and travelled with her. The title doesn’t quite cover it, this is less memories or autobiography than tribute, her mother at the centre of every story. I’d have loved to know more about those English roots – there’s a hint of a family somewhere in the Home Counties who didn’t talk about a wayward daughter who went to America…
The set is minimal: a chair, a table with a vase of flowers and a few small framed photos, a simple chaise longue. It’s masterful storytelling that holds the audience throughout, though for a Fringe slot it could stand to be a touch shorter – we all carry an inbuilt 60-minute clock in Edinburgh. A tender and captivating story delivered by a masgter storyteller that will move you to both laughter and tears.
