F-Bomb Theatre’s Monumental – A Monumental Success

F-Bomb Theatre’s Monumental didn’t simply wander through Edinburgh’s streets, it sought to recalibrate them. Part walking tour, part civic intervention, this bold theatrical project offered more than a revisionist jaunt through the city’s under-commemorated corners. This was a provocation in motion: a demand that public memory stretch to include the women it has too long ignored.

Commissioned for the Edinburgh 900 celebrations, it made an argument not through grand staging or spectacle, but through intimacy, presence and harnessed conviction. I caught it on its second and final date, so I thought I’d take a little more time to parse my thoughts on this extremely ambitious, and extremely likeable act of radical performance.

The concept is as deceptively straightforward as it is resonant

Where, in all this city’s bronze and granite, are the women? Edinburgh honours its poets, politicians, inventors, and even its famously loyal dog, but when it comes to female contributions, the streets are curiously silent. Monumental stepped into that silence, giving voice and presence to five extraordinary lives that history has, if not erased, then casually footnoted.

F-Bomb Theatre’s Monumental didn’t simply wander through Edinburgh’s streets, it sought to recalibrate them.

Each performer embodied not just a character, but an obvious personal investment in their subject. It helps that the monologues were written by by close & talented collaborators: Jaïrus Obayomi, Kirin Saeed, Rachel O’Regan, Emery Schaffer and Hannah Low, a model that lent the work specificity and a textured authenticity.

Samuela Noumtchuet’s Clara Marguerite Christian spoke with a contained grace, sketching the loneliness and resilience of the first Black woman to study at Edinburgh University. Brooke Walker’s Saint Triduana offered an unexpected delight: mystical, defiant, half-saint, half-storyteller, steeped in Kirin Saeed’s rich, spiritual prose. Cara Watson channeled the immortal Maggie Dickson with sardonic flair, turning a tale of survival-by-hanging into a black comedy of injustice and grotesque survival. Laverne Edmonds brought a restrained but quietly arresting performance as oft-overlooked journalist and historian Elizabeth Wiskemann, less operatic than the others, but all the more powerful for its moral clarity. And Layla Rozelle’s Bessie Watson closed the loop with music and movement: young, fierce, and piper-wielding, a suffragette with lungs and purpose.

Between these 5 excellent performers, they clearly, and elegantly illustrated society’s (sadly) immortal issues of systemic misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and ageism. However, none were simple vessels for a political agenda, far from it. No, each was a fully formed personality, complete with a sense of joy as well as sorrow, plus a particular brand of humour. Had each simply offered an impassioned info-dump, the tour would have been a very long one indeed.

Sally Quinn, as the Tour Guide, did more than keep the audience moving. Balancing tone and transition with deft shifts of register, sometimes gently ironic, sometimes pointedly urgent, she held the whole thing together without ever pulling focus.

Edinburgh as Stage and Scene Partner

Director Emily Ingram used the city as more than just backdrop, in this case, a co-conspirator. Stops at McEwan Hall, Greyfriars, and Princes Street Gardens were not arbitrary but charged, framing each monologue with layers of implication. The production never forgot that its audiences were also passersby, flanked by buskers, traffic, and occasionally confused tourists. The interruptions don’t diminish the performances, they sharpen them. To hear Bessie Watson’s pipe call rise above Princes Street noise is to feel history cutting across the present.

That said, the tour’s pacing sometime lagged. The intervals between stops risked thinning the narrative tension, and outdoor acoustics can be uneven.

A Temporary Monument with Weight

But the flaws were real only because the ambition was also. This wasn’t a tidy history lesson, but a feminist manifesto with a walking map. What made Monumental succeed isn’t just the quality of its individual parts, though the writing is sharp and the performances were deft, it’s the cumulative effect: a city slowly refocused, a viewer gradually reoriented.

And there is something radical in the ephemerality of it. These are stories told aloud, in the open, on the move. No plaque will remain. No statue will be raised. The monument is the moment. The legacy is in the remembering—and perhaps in the asking of better questions about what—and who—gets cast in stone.

each was a fully formed personality, complete with a sense of joy as well as sorrow, plus a particular brand of humour. Had each simply offered an impassioned info-dump, the tour would have been a very long one indeed.

Conclusion: Walking, Watching, Witnessing

Monumental may have been modest in budget and footprint, but its implications echo far beyond its route. It’s an invitation to rethink what a civic celebration can look like when it includes those who were never previously invited to the party. F-Bomb Theatre created something rigorous and moving, critical and warm, deeply local and broadly resonant.

It’s a production that taught as it travels, not with a finger wag, but with an open hand. These women’s stories may have falled silent once more when the walk did, but the questions follow us all home. I hope to see it return so that more people, resident and visitor can enjoy this bold experiment in civic theatre.