Theatre review: Pixel Dust

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: 'I'm an explorer,' she says, trapped inside her box-like room, where it quickly becomes apparent she means an internet one.

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139)

***

Projected behind her, “pixels” fall like rain. Will Reynold’s multi-media design really is beautiful. Sitting among it, Simone James plays Daniella, the kind of online obsessed teenager many parents will be all too familiar with, who adopts various personas online but is bullied in real life.

Both her performance and Clare Bayley’s engaging script have a stream-of-consciousness, understated kind of naturalism, but also the unstructured feel that comes from being too rigidly true-to-life. Daniella’s journey, from troubled teen, to trying to come to terms with being adopted broadens the play’s scope, but what it could really do with is more focus.

The comparison between empty virtual relationships and more satisfying real-life ones slowly emerges – with Daniella’s skateboard, discarded with the dirty washing while she plays a skateboarding computer game, nicely summing this up.

“It’s a shithole,” Daniella says of the beautiful landscape while on holiday in Scotland – but eventually learns there is more to life than the pixels that fill her phone, however appealing these are to look at.

Until 27 August. Today 1:10pm.