Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Herald Angel award-winning performer Tom Bailey and his company Mechanimal return to Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Wild Thing!, the sequel to their critically acclaimed 2019 production, Vigil. It’s a fast paced, silly and emotionally moving show about species destruction.
Review
Cheer Pheasant…
Fearful Owl…
Polymorphic Rubber Frog…
Tit-Babbler…
Gladiator Lobsterette…
The names come thick and fast in Mechanimal’s new show. They are all apparently genuine scientifically recorded species and all are on the endangered or threatened list. And the show’s creator and performer, Tom Bailey hops and struts around the stage imitating them one by one as the prompts come up on the projection at the back of the stage.
Initially it seems like a game some students might have come up with while stoned: endangered animal charades – and none the worse for that. The glorious silliness and good humour of Bailey performing a seemingly endless series of animal imitations is totally hilarious and very much appreciated by the audience. Playing with both the species part of the name and the more anthropomorphic descriptive part of the name, (for example, for the ‘arrogant shrew”) Bailey conjures up some very funny cameos. And then there are the times when Bailey appears flummoxed – the projected names speed up too fast for him to catch, a totally obscure inimitable name appears and then there are the names – Naked Dancing Frog! – which invite a rude interpretation. It’s fast and furious and very funny. Just as you’re wondering whether Bailey can sustain a whole hour of this – and, to be fair, on the evidence, there’s no reason why not – he stops and says “What is this man doing impressions of dead animals?”.
From then on, while the show continues to be humorous, we enter darker territory. But Bailey avoids the bleakness that shrouds so much climate change and biodiversity information. Donning a virtual reality headset Bailey takes us on a safari to find the Bali Tiger and onto a place where the bones are buried, finishing off with a final video of a pilgrimage he made.
Tom Bailey is an engaging performer who quickly forms a vital bond with the audience, while Xavier Velastin’s soundtrack is thoughtful and well considered. It’s obviously a highly collaborative process with the whole creative team who deserving applause for the production.
In 2019 Bailey looked at the list of endangered species for a project; at that time there were 26,000 species on the list. He looked at it again for this project in 2024; there were 48,000. The numbers are growing, not just growing but growing exponentially.
Ultimately Wild Things is a journey of love, a paean to biodiversity that engages us and draws us in so that at the end of the show we care deeply about what we’re losing.
