Theatre review: Fingertips

The success of Fresh Meat on television is unlikely to have hindered the expansive Fringe sub-genre of plays by student-age groups which dwells in remarkably similar terms on things like getting drunk, getting into messy relationships, and characters who worry that life might contain disappointment.

Star rating: ***

Venue: C nova (Venue 145)

These are all powerful feelings and themes for drama if definitively handled, but there have doubtless been hundreds of Fringe plays like this over the years which were similarly underheated in their treatment of their own milieu. Youthful self-absorption is fair enough, yet like many before it, Fingertips mistakes the supposed ‘drama’ of drunken arguments for the real drama of wider human experience.

On its own terms, however, this piece by Naomi Fawcett and director Natalie Denton is well put-together and performed by its capable cast, with a sharp eye for how new technology affects the language of social life.

What sort of sex do you want if you log into Tindr, Grindr or Bristlr, for example? What sort of young woman photographs everything she does and puts it on Instagram, and what is she missing in life?

Amid the six-piece ensemble’s night out, which starts with sass and ends with sobbing, the script is attuned to the experience of youth in 2016; melodrama aside, it’s a piece which contemporaries of the creators will enjoy.

Until 29 August. Tomorrow 3:10pm.

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