Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Flick
House of Oz and Mad Nun Productions
Genre: New Writing, Solo Show, Theatre
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Flick is a nurse, Mark has cancer, the kind you can’t come back from. He’s also dangerously attractive. When Mark asks Flick for a favour boundaries start to blur, lives to intersect and secrets to start to emerge. A darkly comedic thriller about life, death, and really bad decisions.
Review
There’s no set, no props, just a single stool and a performer in hospital scrubs. Flick (Madelaine Nunn), a palliative care nurse, is relieved that one of their most difficult patients has finally died. She apologises for the black humour as she introduces us to a cast of staff and patients, creating an entire world in a small lecture theatre that is not altogether conducive to suspending disbelief. But she achieves it and in spades. Despite that there is a striking intimacy, we’re not watching a performance from a distance – we’re being confided in. And what unfolds is a beautifully observed journey through grief, connection, and the messy business of caring. Nunn’s writing is tight, clever, and often unexpectedly funny. It weaves humour and pain with a deft hand, building the world of the ward with just voice, gesture, and expression.
As a former nurse I found this ward felt completely authentic despite my experience being 50 years ago on the other side of the planet. There’s the gallows humour, the camaraderie, the impossible demands. Flick’s patients and colleagues appear with pinpoint clarity – especially the quietly magnetic Mark, younger than most and terminally ill, with a PhD in pyrotechnics. It’s an oddly perfect detail. As Flick becomes increasingly drawn into his story – and agrees to a request that crosses ethical lines – her own story and secrets start to emerge.
The story and performance are beautifully paced; Director Emily O’Brien-Brown makes every move mean something, there is no purposeless striding around the stage, every step takes the story forward. A subtle sound design by Christian Biko underpins and supports Nunn’s absorbing performance.
Her comic timing is impeccable, her physicality subtle but razor-sharp. One moment we’re laughing with Flick’s nosy mum or her chaotic best friend Stacy, and the next we’re hit with the quiet devastation of loss, loneliness, and things left unsaid. The tone shifts effortlessly – never jarring, always grounded.
The humour never undermines the depth; instead, it humanises. What could have been macabre or overly bleak is instead rich with warmth, wit and truth. The writing embraces contradiction – we’re laughing one minute and holding our breath the next – and the ending, when it comes, is both surprising and completely earned.
This is a piece that doesn’t shout – it draws you in slowly, reveals itself gently, and leaves you with something quietly profound.
Razor sharp writing and an impeccable performance. A remarkable solo performance. Gritty, witty, and quietly devastating.
