Edinburgh Fringe 2025
UnTethered
The How Theater
Genre: Performance Art, Solo Performance, Solo Play, Solo Show
Venue: Greenside
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Untethered is a solo show by Tana Sirois. It combines autobiographical comedy and interactive theatre, focusing on the experience of a queer, demisexual woman with OCD. The performance uses a mix of storytelling, physical theatre, dance, clown, mime, as well as audience participation, including conceits like ‘trauma bingo’! Rooted in openness and vulnerability, the performer shares her deepest fears as she navigates her journey through intimacy and mental health, challenging ideas about identity and connection. Props, puppetry, and multimedia support the narrative, which centers on confronting intrusive thoughts and seeking authentic self-acceptance. It was reviewed at Brighton Fringe 2025 and described by fellow FringeReview reviewer Simon Jenner as “Exciting Work”. This reviewer agrees with that in relation to this version at the Fringe and believes it to be a Must-See show as well.
Review
You will learn a hell of a lot about OCD in UnTethered, written and performend by Tana Sirois, as well as some gaining some enlightening explanation of demisexuality, but this is not educational. It is a demand to understand, delivered with soft commitment, an offer impossible to refuse.
Yet behind that demand is a gentler invitation to engage in the story of somebody and to really get under the skin of being that person. Performance is both direct, delivered through some tighlty-written scripy and choreographed movement, which sometimes overburdens itself with too much content, making it hard to digest. It then becomes a show you probably need to see twice to catch it all, but not everyone is going to do that. A bit of dramaturgy would help here in order to make more conscious decisions around what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded, simply in terms of the audience experience and their ability to absorb it all. There is human-sized puppetry and the whole project is so inventive that you probably couldn’t pack any more in.
This is one of the most inventive physical theatre productions I have seen on the Fringe this year. The performers’ skills create movement which sometimes is frenetic, and at other times settles into stillness. That stillness then allows the audience’s emotional reaction to rise inside them, and that is when the shared experience occurs. Much of that then creates the sharp intake of breath that literally means this is a breathtaking show. It’s a powerful, affecting thing, and I am rattled, inspired, engaged and disrupted.
There are several shows about OCD here at the Fringe, amongst a broader menu that explores different neurodiversities using different genres. Few have succeeded like this in combining it with those normal desires and needs that we all have, for example, to love and be loved, and to experience pleasure that has no footnotes in our labelled conditions.
There is a sense that the performance occasionally suffers from overbearing, rather than punchy, but there is also a clear message that life, and the conditions that we grow up with, have to be accepted for what they are for life to be lived fully. This is an intelligent production, and the performer combines both knowledge of OCD with self-knowledge, which of course is an ongoing journey for all of us, and that sense of discovery is reflected in the narrative of the piece.
Overall, Untethered combines storytelling, physical theatre and dance, physical comedy and clowning, along with drama, puppetry, and visuals to create a multimedia and multi-talented piece of work. It is a rich and generous production, an important thing, a thing that asks potent questions. It is offered in the style of a discovery show, a confusion, show, an inquiry, both personal and universal. It is an excellent piece of work that also reaches outstanding, by sheer bravado. It is proud and unashamed, tender and humble, entertaining and funny, heartbreaking and authentic. It is rooted in bold creativity and skill.
It sometimes collapses intentionally into chaos and cacophony. Just a few edits here and there, and the theatrical device of silence, even if that is not reflected in the authentic story, would allow the audience to take it all in, in a way that would actually serve the piece as both performance and theatre.
As it stands, it is compelling and a must-see.
