Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Keeping Secrets
Balancing Act Theatre and Jim Vetter Productions
Genre: Theatre, Theatrical Storytelling
Venue: Stephenson Theatre at theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Engaging, moving and hopeful, this one-person show examines links between what magicians do and what child sexual abusers do – and how secrets can be powerful in positive and destructive ways. Based on the performer’s true-life story from 1970s Boston to today, Keeping Secrets combines acting, visuals and a magic trick or two. A riveting performance, the show explores how traumatic experiences can be transformed into positive action. Creator Jim Vetter has enchanted fans internationally as a magician, mime and actor. Preview audiences call Keeping Secrets: Amazing, riveting, raw, funny, hopeful and that it ‘should be on Netflix.’
Review
Magic gave young Jim freedom and joy. Then the person who taught him magic took something else from him. That violation doesn’t just damage a child; it corrupts the very thing that made him feel alive. The magic he loved became tangled up with trauma.
Keeping Secrets uses David Oliver’s story: a magician arrested for child abuse as a way to help us understand Jim’s own. It’s a powerful choice: another magician, another life shaped by secrets, another journey through darkness toward something resembling healing. By stepping into David Oliver’s experience, Vetter lets us step into his.
What’s genuinely striking is how Vetter holds all of this without collapse. He shares his story openly, willingly, and with real passion. This is urgent material, the kind of theatre that needs to exist right now. It challenges everything we think we know about safety and trust. It shows us that what feels normal, what looks trustworthy on the surface, isn’t always what it seems. Sometimes trusting someone is not the right thing to do.
This is emotional material with genuinely hard-hitting moments, but he never demands your pity. He shows you his journey from childhood to today with quiet confidence, trusting you to understand what was taken and what he’s had to rebuild. You discover how Jim struggled for years, and then how he found power in openly naming his abuser. He owns that name now, so it no longer owns him. The pacing is assured, and he knows exactly when to hit an emotional beat and when to let silence carry the weight. There’s real craft in that restraint.
The production design could sharpen up. The lighting changes feel slightly jarring, and there’s quite a lot of movement on stage, presumably to convey the restlessness of youth or the search for answers. But the material is strong enough to hold its ground without quite so much motion. Less would genuinely be more here. These are small things, though, and they don’t undermine what Vetter is doing.
What he’s built here matters. This is theatre that looks directly at something most people look away from, and it emerges hopeful. It asks what courage looks like, what healing looks like, and what we can do with our own pain. It’s a show that takes real risks and knows how to land them. This is a must-see show.
