Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Lost Girls / At Bus Stops
Genesis Theatre Productions
Genre: Drama, LGBTQIA+, Queer Theatre, Theatre
Venue: The Box at Assembly
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A beautifully-crafted queer romance set over a single August night in Edinburgh, Lost Girls / At Bus Stops follows Jess and Iona as they struggle to come to terms with all of the things they wanted to say.
Review
An epic two-hander fresh off the Play, a Pie, and a Pint circuit, Róisín Sheridan Bryson’s Lost Girls / At Bus Stops is a beautifully tender piece, both a love letter to young relationships and to the city of Edinburgh itself. With a fizzing, bubbling energy that simmers throughout, Lost Girls presents a fragmented cityscape during a single night in August, where amongst the backdrop of the Fringe, two girls – Jess (Catriona Faint) and Iona (Leyla Aycan) – are searching for something. Whether it’s the best show, or best takeaway, the entire hour pulsates with an undercurrent of possibility as they take the city by storm, meeting at bus stops and dingy comedy venues and wherever else the night takes them. And in doing so, they wrestle with all the unsaid feelings they have for each other.
A queer romance, the Fringe takes a backseat to this hour-long love story. Faint and Aycan have an electric chemistry, and it’s easy to forget that there might be something – anything – beyond The Box, the small Assembly venue where this show is housed this year. An entire world is shaped within the play, with a sense of a meta-theatrical magical realism (with the appearance of a drag queen or an angel, depending on which of the two you ask) that’s artfully crafted by both the script itself, and the set design.
With lyrical dialogue that seamlessly alternates between narrative and a non-linear stream of consciousness – taking cues from something akin to Virginia Woolf – director Laila Noble enriches this through her skilled direction. The set itself leans into the sense of fragmentation, with a bus stop flipping and changing into a tarot booth at a second’s notice. The lighting almost takes on a comedic timing of its own, and complements the tongue in cheek fourth wall breaks – but not too many as to feel saturated or tacked on.
Lost Girls / At Bus Stops is a heartfelt play about queerness, lesbianism, and young love, a reflection of the self on stage that feels like a gentle sigh of relief amongst the hustle and bustle of the crowds. And after watching this, we should all be waiting with baited breath to see what Róisín Sheridan Bryson does next.
