Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Beggared in SA
Stewart Clark and Gideon de Wet
Genre: character comedy, Dark Comedy, Devised, Physical Theatre, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: The Bowler's Rest
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Stark, uncompromising theatre devised of lived stories of poverty, systemic violence, and survival while keeping hope and humanity alive.
Review
Beggared in SA is a biographical solo piece, presented at The Bowler’s Rest from 18:00, by the engaging Sean Higgs. A play on the fringes of society: those who are marginalised, invisible or “other”, epitomises the Fringe forum being raw, fraught with possibility, and costly to both mind and wallet.
Higgs, a veteran of theatre and film, worked closely with the protagonist, Stewart Clark and celebrated South African director, Gideon de Wet, to develop this hugely entertaining and emotionally-wrought kaleidoscope of characters and lived experiences.
The production is testimony, revelation, and raw performance with no spectacle to diffuse or distract. Using only presence, voice, and skilled showmanship, Higgs immediately transports the audience from a dark room of a Leith pub, to the gold dust and shimmering heat of the South African roadside. Our lead makes friends with a traffic light while portraying the humiliation and invisibility felt with each passing car-a beautiful journey reminiscent of, and comparable to, the brilliant Waiting for Godot.
The piece’s strengths lie in vivid vignettes which plunge the audience into the backdrop of a country haunted by its past and throttled by its present inequalities, as Higgs weaves a remembered encounter, a sharply drawn moment, a fragment of bitter humour, cut through with raw honesty. It feels at once personal and archetypal: one voice becomes many, one narrative opens into a broader social indictment.
If the pacing sometimes falters, lingering too long on its set-ups before the sharper blows land, this mirrors the fractured, uneasy rhythm of the world it describes. The unevenness feels deliberate: to unsettle, to deny the audience any smooth passage through. Higgs’ physical and vocal precision becomes the staging, turning body and breath into instruments of grief, anger, and surprising wit.
What makes the piece sing is its integrity, fierce commitment to naming what is too often silenced, and holding both performer and audience in the raw space of recognition. Beggared in SA demands audiences and the world at large, to bear witness to consequences, and denies further complicity with the cause of such disparity.
In a festival often filled with distraction and gloss, Beggared in SA is a bracing reminder of theatre’s power to confront a disappointing reality. Fiercely emotional, intensely compelling, Higgs commands your attention in this show of survival, humanity and hope, and deserves an audience, the larger the better.
Proudly supporting “Invisible Cities” of Leith: experienced tour guides, all of whom have been affected by homelessness, simply live and breathe their cities. Invisible Cities is a social enterprise offering walking tours in cities across the UK.
