Edinburgh Fringe 2025

The Brilliance of Broken Glass: Button

Brooke-being-Brooke

Genre: Autobiography, Dark Comedy, Storytelling

Venue: Pleasance Courtyard

Festival: Edinburgh Fringe

Low Down

Review

It took me a few minutes to equilibrate. Is our besequinned host a character, a persona or her authentic self? I settle upon a combination of the latter two. In facilitator fashion, Brooke-being-Brooke opens with “permission slips”. Trigger warnings, feel free to laugh or cry, you do you… This is done with an authentic sense of care, and strikes a chord of emotional intelligence and openness that reverberates throughout.

Sped-up camcorder footage of Brooke as a toddler explicates part of the show’s title: “Point to your nose. Point to your chin. Point to your button.” She soon got the message: “It was the button that was the real people-pleaser”. This (literally and metaphorically) touching introduction foreshadows the surgical story that’s about to unfold: “I have had three belly buttons”. This is done with a playful dose of self-awareness: this “literal child” has written a navel-gazing fringe show literally about her navel – “PART TWO… OF MY… TRAUMA… TRILOGY…!!!”

Autobiographical theatre comes in many forms, and it’s a delicate dance. Trip-wires and pot-holes abound: victimhood, vanity, trauma safari… Brooke deftly avoids all of them and trips the light fantastic along the way. “The sequins help”. This New Yorker even resists taking low-hanging pot shots at the incumbent commander-in-chief when referring to her (presumably) tongue-in-cheek ‘Brooke-for-President” campaign.

A sophisticated storyteller, Brooke relays a harrowing tale of years of preventable (but unprevented) medical trauma, with many associated losses – of friends, of family, of youth, of voice, of identity, of the ability to walk, of positive self-regard… Peppered with humour and laced with references to popular culture, this never strays into self-indulgence. Throughout, we are accompanied by her emotional support animal, the stuffed toy that made her a minor celebrity on the wards: “The girl with the doggie is in again”. Her grandmother provides the stoic role model and moral compass that can sometimes skip a generation: “I survived the Holocaust for this shit?!!”

Toward the finale, following a couple of well-executed false endings, we learn the full meaning of the show’s enigmatic, if a little clunky, title. Light refracted by shards of broken glass on her apartment floor throw rainbows on the wall and point to the beauty that comes with being, and feeling, broken. This could come off as cheesy, and perhaps it is a little, but it’s also profoundly true and entirely relatable and by this point, she has more than earned it.

The aesthetic of the audiovisuals is charmingly goofy. Without wishing to descend into armchair psychology, I came away with the sense that Brooke, who tells us she watches the Wizard of Oz every day (can this really be true?), is eternally seeking her way back to the acceptance and approval that evaded her for so long. She gets it in spades from this audience, and deservedly so. It is incredibly endearing.

I haven’t ever seen a show quite like this, and for a while I struggled to place it. What even is it? It is incredibly open, vulnerable storytelling – brutally so in places, though she spares us the details – and infused with humanity and a fragile warmth. Brooke is fast-taking and the narrative is so rich that I struggled to keep up at times. Likewise, more than a few of the cultural references passed me by. I found myself wondering whether she might have done more to tailor the references for a largely British audience, or to vary the pace a little, to give some of the lines more  space to breathe. Perhaps this is the case. But as The Brilliance of Broken Glass: Button drew toward its conclusion, I increasingly found myself thinking: “Whatever this is, it’s exactly what it needs to be.”

Published August 27, 2025August 27, 2025 by James Mannion