The smoke machines are still cooling down across Edinburgh, and the scent of candyfloss and existential dread hasn’t quite left the air. When visual theatre takes a massive swing, you either get a revelation or a concussive blow to the head. Manipulate 2026 offered a healthy dose of both.
Here is the post-mortem on five of the festival’s offerings this year, which found yours truly in the stalls with notebook and pen in hand…
Auntie Empire (Disaster Plan / Julia Taudevin)
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Julia Taudevin drags Britannia through the mud in a violently grotesque piece of bouffon theatre that hits its target, provided you survive the messy opening. Practical body horror does the heavy lifting here, skewering British imperial nostalgia and Scotland’s own complicity in it.
Taudevin owns the room as ‘Auntie’, a decaying personification of the empire upon her deathbed. She is resplendent in head-to-toe tartan, complete with false teeth pointing in every direction and a teacup perched precariously on her head. When the satire hits, it bruises. A central puppet sequence charting the uneasy union of the Scottish and English nations—featuring puppets literally rutting their way across the globe as a metaphor for conquest—is an absolute masterclass in jaw-dropping nastiness. She even practically poohs out the Koh-i-Noor diamond for our amusement.
Julia Taudevin drags Britannia through the mud in a violently grotesque piece of bouffon theatre that hits its target, provided you survive the messy opening.
That said, getting to that pitch-black sweet spot takes work. The opening scenes are a tad bogged down by laboured audience participation, forcing punters to hand out tea and Tunnock’s teacakes. It blunts the impact when it needs more of a razor edge. The room is forced to wade through awkward stalling before the genuine, darker theatrical language finally takes hold. But when it does…it really does!
The Raft of the Crab (Ninon Noiret)
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
If there is an undisputed triumph to be plucked from the carcass of this year’s festival, it is Ninon Noiret’s autobiographical confrontation with a cancer diagnosis. She refuses to sentimentalise survival. Instead, she maps the physical and emotional toll of illness using a Chinese pole, spoken word, and a menacing crab puppet masterfully directed by Gavin Glover.
The pole work is not mere circus spectacle. It functions as a relentless narrative engine, embodying the precarious balance and sheer physical labour of enduring medical treatment. Jim Harbourne’s low-rumbling sound design and Michaella Fee’s shifting, intimate lighting ensure the tension never drops.
Crucially, this isn’t a grim endurance test. A surprisingly buoyant, brightly lit strand of comedy runs from the first minute to the last, preventing the piece from collapsing under its own weight. The crab itself flits effortlessly between tormentor and genuinely funny companion. Aside from a very brief, self-referential muddying of the waters near the finish line regarding the nature of art and performance, it is an arresting, deeply personal piece of immense emotional rigour and technical brilliance.
Coffee with Sugar? (KMZ Kollektiv)
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Documentary theatre is a notoriously tricky beast. Berlin-based KMZ Kollektiv attempts to unpack the ugly, enduring legacy of European colonialism and German capital in Central American coffee plantations. Visually, it arrests the senses. Performers Laia Ribera Cañénguez and Yahima Piedra Córdova deploy striking material metaphors—thousands of coffee beans scattering through the air, and the surreal, suffocating imagery of a plantation owner represented by a mask of spun candyfloss.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a talent issue. Ribera Cañénguez and Piedra Córdova command the room with an undeniable, magnetic charm and formidable stage presence. The problem lies in the connective tissue. The production entirely fails to marry its inventive staging with its rancid historical commentary. It isn’t that the piece is hollow; rather, it remains an aesthetically arresting experience that never quite coalesces around the genuinely weighty themes it attempts to expound. Ultimately, the visual payload lands, but the intellectual one scatters.
Size Matters (Mamoru Iriguchi / Vanishing Point)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
There is an undeniable, eccentric charm to Mamoru Iriguchi’s latest outing, a cerebral “Alice in Wonderland” investigation into how we perceive our own growth. With performer Julia Darrouy and puppet doubles, Sunshine and Tangerine, Iriguchi weaves a playful, mind-bending journey through physics and surrealism. The puppetry is the show’s greatest asset—beautifully crafted and deftly handled, reflecting the performers’ own movements with an eerie, synchronised precision that highlights the “parasitical” relationship between host and double.
Gavin Pringle’s meta-narrator adds a dryly comic layer, appearing first as a miniature puppet before stepping out to offer a masterclass in the invisible forces shaping our reality. It is technically accomplished, using sonic effects to warp physical dimensions and explore the delicate art of muscle memory. Unfortunately, there’s a persistent tendency toward the over-explanatory; the text often clings to the need to explain itself or give excessive detail. While this causes the pacing to sag in the middle, for those who appreciate visual ingenuity and a sincere meditation on mortality, the craft on display is undeniable.
The Rite of Spring (Dewey Dell)
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Italian collective Dewey Dell opens with a sensory assault so intense it provoked walk-outs in the opening minutes. For remainers, a vast, cavernous stage filled with haze became a subterranean world where performers mutated into cave-dwelling insectoids to the strains of Stravinsky’s iconic score. Guoda Jaruševičiūtė’s unsettling costumes—maggots, leaf insects, and a predatory mantis—are fascinating, rendering the cycle of birth and death with a grotesque, prehistoric beauty.
Ribera Cañénguez and Piedra Córdova command the room with an undeniable, magnetic charm and formidable stage presence. The problem lies in the connective tissue.
Teodora and Agata Castellucci’s choreography is fearless; seeing contemporary muscularity meet the explosive, animalistic energy of breakdancing taps directly into the raw pulse of the music. While the first half is a high-concept visual banquet, the production eventually struggles to deliver a coherent message regarding humanity’s intervention in the natural world. In particular, a pivot in the second half toward human explorers in beekeeper-like suits risks muddying the narrative waters, leaving the experience feeling intellectually thinner than its visual ambition would suggest.
The Verdict
A programme that gleefully ricochets between giant crabs, decaying imperial matriarchs, spun-sugar masks, and breakdancing insects is never going to be an entirely smooth ride. That is exactly the point.
At a time of year when Edinburgh usually battens down the hatches and succumbs to post-Hogmanay gloom, this festival drags audiences by the scruff of the neck into the weird, the challenging, and the confrontational. It provides a vital pulse of international and homegrown visual theatre to a city that too often risks resting on its August laurels. You might leave a venue battered, bewildered, or completely spellbound, but you certainly won’t leave bored. Long may the madness continue.
Featured Image: The Raft of the Crab supplied by Manipulate Fest PR
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