Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Motorway
Daniel Cuckow and Abigail Sinclair
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Zoo Playground
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Maeve and Lucy tend to the cafe at the side of a motorway. Friends from childhood they have been through a lot and now are going through night shifts together. Lucy, now a bit of a livewire observes Maeve in her relationship with Felix who works at a secretive base across from their café. when a mysterious Dr. Padmore arrives to get his cup of coffee with so much sugar in it that it’s instant diabetes, then an extraterrestrial encounter occurs, this splits the two good friends and things continue to be weird.
Review
This is a young company who have produced something that doesn’t always quite make sense but has a real theatrical sense of itself. Daniel Cuckow and Abigail Sinclair have penned an absurd story delving into drug taking and conspiracy theories that are media friendly just now.
Motorway has Lucy out in the audience at the beginning, and she continually goes back and forth to have conversations with the audience which are commentaries as well as comic interruptions.
The script has areas where it could be tightened allowing more of character development for all four characters. At times I feels like they represent something rather than hey have more of a back story. We get some of that for the female characters but nothing really for the male ones. The two male roles have a function rather than a fully rounded part to play.
All four actors were really good, and I enjoyed all of their performances.
The set worked, the lighting was good and the soundscape was what it needed to be. There were elements worked really well – Lucy’s breakdown and the belly for the extraterrestrial inhabiting Maeve was good use of costume.
Felix came across as a bit of a gym rat whilst Dr. Padmore was effectively bizarre and strange.
Many fringe productions try to achieve absurd. Here what Cuckow and Sinclair have done is taken a night shift, something that young people are increasingly finding themselves having to do, elements of a life people believe they are constantly taking and made I feel bizarre. In an eerie place which can play great tricks on the mind this has been done with skill. I can imagine someone on a night shift, sitting with too much caffeine coming up with this on a night shift. As such it is therefore a perfect fit for the Fringe.
