Theatre review: Femage a Trois

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Women are firmly centre-stage in these three short plays about female experience by Loquitur, a theatre company specialising in new writing.

Gilded Balloon at Rose Theatre (Venue 76)

***

Polly Churchill’s Safe to Shoot, about a middle-aged woman who ditches her cheating husband and decides she’d like to date again, is the strongest of the three. Sarah Swingler is excellent in this funny, poignant tale of a woman who gets her mojo back, and not in the way she expects.

Victoria Turnbull’s The Best Worst Day of My Life is a straightforward, if not ground-breaking, portrait of a new mother (Gemma Harvey) trying to reconcile her exhaustion and isolation with the feelings of “love on a scale I’ve never felt before”.

Claire Gordon-Webster’s Hysteria is a darker proposition. Here, mild-mannered Bea (Alex Kapila) opts for radical surgery as a response to the abuse she has suffered, but the writing isn’t quite strong enough to carry the weight of such dark material.

Nevertheless, Femage a Trois feels like three-for-the-price-of-one, a substantial hour, and a good platform for new writing talent.