Edinburgh Fringe 2025
How To Kill Your Landlord
DBN Productions
Genre: Comedy, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Bedlam Theatre
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
How To Kill Your Landlord is an absurdist comedy of errors focusing on three young housemates; a former student activist, barely earning enough to pay the rent; a freelance yoga instructor desperate to corner the yummy mummy market; and a crypto bro with more side hustles than Del Boy. All three are united in their contempt for chauvinistic landlord Archie, who has just given them one week’s notice to leave.
Review
To the splendidly capacious and comfortable Bedlam Theatre for Medway Conway’s absurdist, comedy of errors How To Kill Your Landlord, a sentiment one suspects many in the relatively young audience could identify with, this being Edinburgh with its skyscraper prices and cut-throat rental scene. Perhaps they were here to pick up a few tips.
A complex box set greets us, depicting the typical sleazy, run down, damp dump you associate with much of the UK’s ageing rental stock for which anyone daft enough to want a bit of independence before hitting pension age will have to pay a King’s ransom, of course. Three such dafties are desperate enough to be forking out more than they can afford to rent this dingy dump; Harriet, a freelance yoga instructor with an online following of yummy-mummies; Joq, a man with more side hustles than the infamous Del Boy; and Burke whose politics are so far left as to be off the field.
Three more different flatmates it would be hard to find, and they’d rip each other to shreds were they not united in their hatred for and contempt of Archie, the epitome of the scheming landlord with his sole aim being his tenants’ summary eviction so he can flip the flat and exploit the next set of gullible renters.
But the trio resolve to put up a fight. Cue planning of daring, dastardly deeds in large numbers that will lure the poor unsuspecting Archie to his grisly fate. And this is where it starts to get really complicated, the plot taking more twist and turns than the Traquair House maze (look it up, it’s the biggest in Scotland with no dead ends but a lot of false leads) as the action speeds up to a breakneck pace. And the denouement are (yep, there are several, it’s that sort of farce) unexpected and splendidly executed in equal measure.
Direction by Calum Shiels steered us firmly in the direction of the slapstick and the silly, with John Gregor (Archie) playing the role of pantomime villain with aplomb, Frankie Weatherby (Harriet) well suited to her yummy mummy clientele and Elijah Khan (Joq) about as cool as a crypto bro can be. And hats off to the splendid Robbie Fletcher-Hill (Burke) whose physical theatre abilities were right to the fore, his seemingly infinitely elastic facial expressions mirroring the random changes in plot.
The audience clearly enjoyed what was presented to them and this dark, riotous comedy clearly struck a chord with a lot of them, their presumably having experienced some of the landlord related frustrations evidenced across the piece. Perhaps there could have been more substance to the dialogue and less slapstick, particularly given there’s a recognised societal issue in terms of the UK rental property sector. The plot also tended to wander as the play unfolded and there could have been more done to develop the on-stage relationships of the tenants.
That said, the actors were clearly having a ball on stage and managed to keep most of the audience with them most of the time. It’s a good show with the potential to improve. Less shenanigans and plot twists and an injection of a more focused message and you’ll have a piece of theatre that’s relevant to the 8.6 million UK households that are controlled by a landlord of one kind or another. That’s a lot of landlords.
