Brighton Year-Round 2025
The Shadow in the Mirror
Alfie Bridle
Venue: Sweet Venues at Yellow Book Bar
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
“The Shadow in the Mirror” is a one-man play about Edwin Ashcroft, whose ambition for power leads him to commit a serious wrongdoing. As he reflects on his past, he is forced to face the consequences of his actions. What begins as a sense of control gradually gives way to inner conflict and regret.
Review
Shadow in the Mirror is a one-man play at Sweet Venues in Brighton, staged at Sweet @ The Yellow Book. The story follows Edwin Ashcroft, whose ambition and pursuit of power lead to dark consequences. The script is described as intense and poetic, focusing on themes of morality and the results of personal choices.
Alfie Bridle, the seventeen year-old performer of The Shadow in the Mirror delivers a powerful solo portrayal of Edwin Ashcroft, capturing the character’s ruthless ambition and inner torment with intensity and poetic depth. Their performance is central to the play’s exploration of morality and guilt, engaging audiences through a compelling, nuanced depiction of a man haunted by his past.
There is much darkness here, and the comparisons with The Picture of Dorian Gray and the work of Edgar Allan Poe are appropriate. There is scope here to detach further from these tropes.
Visually, the piece works extremely well, with the striking mirror frame well crafted and prominent on stage, allowing the actor to become the shadow in the mirror, a shade that haunts Ashcroft. There is a gothic horror feel to this, but it is also a psychological piece that explores conscience and guilt and the consequences of our actions.
As our central character attempts to justify his own dark deeds, this is an exploration of the unjustifiable being justified and the clever narratives we create to excuse our actions.
Vocal delivery needs to step further away from present-day idiom and accent to really immerse us in the piece and its milieu.
This thoroughly impresses as a piece of youth theatre, and with further development, the actor has a bright future, particularly if he can step more fully into that vocal delivery.
Pacing also needs work, and there are times when picking up the pace would really serve the piece. It needs more variation to give it the subtlety and nuance it requires.
But we are taken credibly into the life of this character, and it is an uncomfortable place to be, for good reasons theatrically.
Overall, this is recommended fringe theatre, which marks an impressive debut in the challenging field of psychological drama and horror.
The stage is small, and this serves the piece well, but it was the prominence and scale of the set that really brought this right into the audience and made it feel immersive. Dramaturgy will tighten the script further, and there is scope for some clearer signposting of the narrative.
The actor, Alfie Bridle, who also self-directed and wrote the piece, commits fully to the part and the character, and is visually arresting in costume and in the evocation of unpleasant happenings.
This is definitely a tale for Halloween and dark winter nights, and it is worth leaning into, because then you will encounter the violence that is done and the moral questions that are raised by this boldly penned solo theatre piece.
