The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
Do not see Conversations We’ve Never Had, As People We’ll Never Be if you’ve just been through a breakup. Also, don’t see it if you’ve ever said something you shouldn’t or not said something you desperately needed to get off your chest. Don’t see it if you’ve ever felt the joy of falling in love with someone or the insurmountable, crushing grief of knowing you have to let that love go. Because if you've gone through any of those milestones, you will find yourself shedding a tear or two, hoping against hope that your raw wound can be disguised by some of Edinburgh’s summer rain.
Conversations We’ve Never Had, As People We’ll Never Be follows Gina (performed by playwright Lucy Harris) and Frankie (Siobhán Cassidy) in the wake of their sudden, devastating breakup. This is a story of a “Confronter,” Frankie (categorized as a person who confidently approaches conflict with a sharp tongue) and a “Shower Fighter” Gina (a person who obsessively replays seemingly missed opportunities to say the perfect thing, lodge the perfect insult, or strike a perfect compromise).
The Confronter and Shower Fighter of this story are here to debate whether or not they will test fate by forgetting the entirety of their six-year relationship. (Magically? Pharmaceutically? The means are never quite made clear.)
This is not a Black Mirror episode, nor is it a quirky Kate Winslet-led indie. This is a stop clock. There’s 30 minutes for our pair to decide—and decide they must, together. Throughout, Gina and Frankie fall in and out of memories from their relationship, beats signaled by warm lighting and movements like clasped hands or the sudden appearance of tweezers.
Though the ghosts of happier times provide relief from the discord, for this reviewer, the glimpses don’t feel like enough to have you root for them. It’s also difficult to articulate what one might root for them to do—forget each other, not forget each other, find the romance between them again, forge a friendship, or (as Gina at one point suggests) throw caution to the wind and shag it out.
But maybe that’s the confounding beauty of the piece—that in the wake of a sunken relationship, there is no right answer, no chartered course on which you can set sail. And even if you tried, you’d find your ship spinning in circles, siren songs of beauty in the bygone relationship as alluring as tempests are terrifying.
People aren’t devices that can get a factory restart. At one point, the Confronter argues that the opposite of remembering isn’t forgetting. The cure to grief isn’t banishment of all feelings. There’s also all that pesky “for the best” business, further swinging the pendulum between two points—to forget, not to forget. What if, as is true for Gina, you’ve become a person you don’t recognize, and don’t like, in the relationship? What if your future goals, like whether or not you want children, simply don’t align no matter how hard you try? And you do try.
OK, maybe do see Conversations We’ve Never Had, As People We’ll Never Be and maybe see it especially if you’ve just been through a breakup, felt your heart pound with love, felt it fracture from loss, or said too much or said too little. Because through that lens of heartbreak, you may find the answer to that seemingly impossible question coming rather naturally. Whether you like it or not, there is (at the bottom of your and your ex-lover’s stormy sea) a treasure trove for which only you and they have the map and the key.
Conversations We Never Had, As People We'll Never Be runs at Assembly Front Rooms through August 25. Follow Orange Moon Theatre Co to see where Harris is performing next. See photos from Conversations We Never Had, As People We'll Never Be below.
Lucy Harris in Conversations We Never Had, As People We'll Never Be
Siobhán Cassidy in Conversations We Never Had, As People We'll Never Be
Lucy Harris and Siobhán Cassidy in Conversations We Never Had, As People We'll Never Be
Lucy Harris and Siobhán Cassidy in Conversations We Never Had, As People We'll Never Be
Lucy Harris and Siobhán Cassidy in Conversations We Never Had, As People We'll Never Be
