Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Low Down
Clara has a plan. It involves a life drawing class, her favourite lecturer and stripping naked in front of a room full of strangers. Nude is a solo play about desire, fantasy and the seductive idea that being seen is the same as being empowered.
Review
Clara wants to impress her tutor and, having discovered he’s an artist who attends a life drawing class, volunteers to model for it herself.
Performed by Hattie Chapman and developed on Menagerie Theatre Company’s Young Writers’ Workshop 2025, Nude is Phoebe Segal’s second play and her Edinburgh Fringe debut. The writing is excellent throughout – elegant, witty, drawing on a wide range of literary and musical sources, from Donne to Kanye West, to build a thoroughly believable young university student. At its heart is a biting examination of the pressure on teenage girls and young women to be defined by the attention of boys and men: whether she exists at all in the absence of a man noticing, and validating her.
The play flips deftly between the present, where she’s obsessed with being her tutor’s favourite, his star pupil, and earlier memories of being fourteen and desperately wanting to be noticed by boys. Along the way it touches on many of the dating and relationship challenges teenage girls have to navigate.
Chapman’s performance is superb: sharp, pacey, flipping between characters in a flash, using accent and physicality so well that we always know exactly who’s who, even across a sizeable cast of characters. She draws the audience in skilfully, gesturing to drawings on the wall of her tutor’s study, delivering asides that land every time.
Co-directed by Merlyn Haycraft and Phoebe Segal, the story occupies all of the stage, as Clara indicates the drawings by her tutor, makes use of the one chair not only to present some characters (mostly male and sprawling) but to add height as she climbs on it, and a room divider that becomes almost part of the narrative as Clara peeps over it while changing; even the floor is used to play out some of the action.
It starts lightly, hints at darker things fairly early, but never quite tips into disaster or tragedy – it always remains believable, relatable, even to an older woman who never had to deal with mobile phones, TikTok or sexting in her youth. It feels a little constrained by being only 50 minutes; there were moments – some of her early teenage experiences, where she is desperate for attention and facing compromising herself – that could have used a little more room to breathe, to explore consequences and lasting impact more fully as Clara matures. However, Fringe shows are always a tricky balance between how much to include and how long a show should be, and this one certainly packs a huge amount into its 50 minutes.
Overall, a show with considerably more depth than its poster or pitch first suggests. And it is very funny, except when it isn’t – and that’s where the power of it lies.
Superb writing and a stunning solo performance.
