FringeReview Scotland 2025
Perfect Dead Girls
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Emergence Festival

Genre: Fringe Theatre
Venue: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.
Festival: FringeReview Scotland
Low Down
Well-crafted and directed piece of theatre which had two young people waiting for the next stage in their death. Performed with a theatricality at its heart with switches between short and longer scenes, this managed to capture the emotional turmoil of one victim stuck without being able to leave and the conflict of finding out that their partner could.
Review
The Emergence Festival by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is about challenge. Here it was hardly an innovative topic but given the young performers on stage and their craft in making this work, there were wise heads throughout the piece.
The ability to comprehend and understand the importance of short scenes and the development of characterisation as well as the impressive physicality that they managed to imbue with each character carried this. The fast forwarding, rewinding element of it that allowed you to switch the narrative from the past to the present to the future which was something impressively done. The director should take great credit for that.
The actors demonstrated fully rounded characters, even ones who at times were perhaps a little squeaky and annoying, but that was the element that made them more fascinating.
The set was all teen angst in the background with the suggestion of travel in the foreground with gaudy coloured suitcases that would be seen in many an airport concourse suggesting and hinting at the transient nature of their journey.
Key within the script was the emergence of the stories. By not giving away from the very beginning a linear narrative explaining why both characters were doing in this particular place drove our inquisitive nature: we wanted to know more. It helped that we didn’t get to know whether or not this was purgatory or what.
That lack of over-explanation allowed us as an audience us to feel that we were being credited with sufficient knowledge, understanding and intelligence, that it was unnecessary to get it all at one point but the slow reveal with the twist at the end of who is stuck and who is left was all the more effective. The character who tells us how they died with their increasingly frantic attempts to escape works really well juxtaposed with their partner who didn’t tell made it doubly impressive.
Chelsea Grace as the evanescent goth girl, has a degree of comic timing that really hits the heights, especially during some of the physical work. There were moments of less acting and more effect, especially off the line which worked so well. As her partner, Elizabeth Robbins managed to be that shrill girl with panic in her being but did so with subtlety and charm. There were moments it needed to be too much, but at other times it needed to be controlled with discipline – both were pure dead perfect.
Technically this was well imagined, the details in lighting and sound effects matched what we were seeing rounding off the experience with the overall feeling that this was both well imagined and executed. Sometimes the technical aspects can be relegated to an afterthought and here we had something which needed to be performed with confidence and precision. The former a quality in abundance, the latter a skill in its delivery.
I came away afterwards really feeling that I had seen a piece of impressive theatre. It felt like a real stepping stone rather than an emergence. To a certain extent is exactly the level that you would expect to see these students at this point.
An impressive performance, where it hit the heights and kept us onboard – even though it suggested in the set and the narrative people should get off the journey soon as…