Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Flush
Launch Box Productions
Genre: Comedy, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Upstairs at Pleasance Courtyard
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The jokes keep on coming, hilarious props and very silly ideas abound, but there are also serious moments that will worry anyone who cares for the safety of young girls and women today. The beauty of this play lies not only in the precisely observed and acted situations but in the truth behind it all – the sisterhood is there for each other when it counts.
Review
The scene is a women’s bathroom in a club, three wildly graffitied toilet cubicles are open to the front, the dividing walls imagined, and, cleverly, where the mirrors would be is the fourth wall. We can see them but they can’t see us.
It is evening and five young actors, four of whom play multiple parts, are in and out of the room, chatting about boys, work, problems, fixing their make-up, going for a pee! The costume choices are superb: various age groups are present and these are very convincingly designed, the girls quick-changing into the underage girls wearing almost nothing, the slightly older henparty all in pinks, or members of the even more senior office party which had a ‘theme’.
We are treated to a strong variety of performances. The actors use not only the outfits but body language, speed of speech (how the very young can manage to chatter as fast as that confounds me!), accents, their phones, that audience/mirror wall to great effect. Technically, too, the show is spot on with the music blaring when needed, sound effects like toilets flushing, and the light creating special moments.
You’d be forgiven to believe you are watching a verbatim piece of observed reality but there are moments in April Hope Miller’s brilliant writing where she comically skewers her craft as a playwright. A character says something so portentous, it sounds like it comes straight from a pamphlet, and while you reflect that a young woman would not speak like that, her friend comments: “That was really deep!” only for the speaker to ask:”Wait, what did I just say, I need to make a note.”
The jokes keep on coming, hilarious props and very silly ideas abound, but there are also moments that will worry anyone who cares for the safety of young girls and women today. Themes like bullying, bulimia and drug use are addressed realistically, no shying away from embarrassing situations, we get the lowdown on Hinge dates and shaving and I could see many men and older women in the audience who may well have learnt something new that afternoon.
The one guide that leads us like Ariadne’s thread through the bright labyrinth of this play is the situation that Billie, beautifully played by Jazz Jenkins, finds herself in, which is only slowly revealed while all around her non-stop chaos rules. Congratulations to the director Merle Wheldon who kept this hurly-burly so tight.
All actors are truly excellent, but April Miller stands out as the most fascinating to watch. Her many different characters are all so intense, funny, perfectly realised, she knows what she has written and she can show it, too. The beauty of this play lies not only in the precisely observed and acted situations but in the truth behind it all – the sisterhood is there for each other when it counts.
