Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Two Little Pigs
Patrick Bone Productions
Genre: Absurd Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A darkly absurd new play exploring the rise of the manosphere, male loneliness and modern masculinity. When a young man spirals into Andrew Tate rhetoric after a painful break-up, his world is turned upside down by an outspoken feminist pig determined to dismantle his worldview one argument at a time.
Review
The show opens as Mark and Martha return from an evening with her best friend, Mark seething over a cheesecake he insists was shop-bought and passed off as homemade. A small moment which both reveals his need to control and sets the scene for a final showdown that has clearly been coming for a while with Martha announcing she has had enough and is leaving.
His response is to work even harder at YouTube/influencer led weight training, an unsettling preoccupation with protein targets, and finally the arrival of a pig he’s ordered – possibly, as companion who won’t answer back. Although he is also unpacking an incubator…
At which point the play shifts from straight drama to absurdist. The pig, it turns out, can talk and has every intention of answering back. The reason is a little hazy, tangled up in some business about harvesting cells and incubating bacon, but logic isn’t really the point. What matters is that she’s a committed feminist with a passion for literature, and, thanks to everything she has learned from her favourite carer at the farm, she’s able to dismantle Mark’s world view one conversation at a time. There’s real pleasure in watching the tables turn as Pig starts to piece together exactly what Martha was angry about, and Caitlin McKewan’s writing here sparkles – though it’s Pig who gets the best lines, and poor Mark ends up a little two-dimensional, with only occasional glimpses of the vulnerability underneath. The relationship between Mark and Pig progresses unevenly rather than building. There’s a sense of something like a coming-of-age underway, but it’s never quite clear whether Mark has actually travelled anywhere by the end, or simply had the experience happen to him.
The performances of both actors are excellent and the character of Pig is remarkably plausible with great care given to the small details: of movement, snuffling into feeding bowls, snorting when she laughs and using bent fingers to represent trotters. Merle Wheldon’s direction ensures the pace never drops.
The set is minimal and supports the sense we have of Mark’s world – a place that needs to be very tidy and controlled. The lighting, mostly naturalistic, darkens during Mark’s engagement with the online hypermasculine world, giving a glimpse of how being drawn into that world might feel.
The piece feels like new writing in the best and most frustrating senses: full of potential, a little rough round the edges, some unanswered questions and packed with almost more ideas that will fit into a short Fringe hour. But, at the same time, achieving glimpses into the toxic world of the manosphere whilst laughing all the way.
