Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Troubled
Suzy Crothers
Genre: New Writing, Solo Show, Theatre
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
1993, Mum won’t let Alice go to Funderland because Belfast is burning. 2023, Alice falls for Tim, but can she escape the legacy of a childhood shaped by conflict. A tale of love, death and division – told with tea and biscuits. Troubled blends story, projection and humour, reckoning with the past and offering hope for the future.
Review
We’re welcomed gently into Alice’s world with tea and a biscuit. What followed was a bold, beautiful swirl of stories, memories, and voices – fragments from a chaotic mind shaped by a chaotic time.
In Troubled, a semi-autobiographical solo play, Alice (Suzy Crothers) bridges her experience of growing up in Northern Ireland, in a cross-denominational family, under the shadow of the Troubles and her own inner troubles.
At the start The Troubles are the focus with young Alice pleading with her mother to be allowed to join her friends going to Funderland against a news broadcast of the aftermath of a bombing in Northern Ireland. Despite her plaintive ‘but everyone’s going’ her mother is firm. The contrast between her eagerness and the stark images behind her is powerful.
We then jump forward thirty years to the adult Alice living in Lisbon as she navigates neurodiversity, a possibly diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and a new love.
Crothers populates Alice’s world with a kaleidoscope of characters as well as her inner voices, each demanding to be heard.
It is a pacy, emotionally rich, disarmingly funny, and sometimes surreal piece of animated storytelling as Alice gets distracted by something that catches her eye and whisks us off in a new direction, untrammelled by geography or time.
The effect feels chaotic in places and difficult to follow at times. There are elements we want to hear more of, to have a thread tidied up but perhaps that is the point. Alice’s inner world is unpredictable, at times colourful at others dark and little scary and she is sharing that world with us.
The lecture theatre setting suits the piece perfectly – intimate, focused, without unnecessary distractions – and allows the lighting and visuals to work well, bringing additional context to the stories. The balance of humour and heartbreak is deftly held; there are moments of laughter, tenderness, and vulnerability.
I was left with a deeper sense of Alice’s world and the ways in which the ripples of violence and unrest can continue to echo down the years. Wondering how much those early experiences have affected all the Alice’s whose childhood was spent against a backdrop of fear and bombs.
An impressive first solo show that lingers long after the biscuits are gone.
