EdFringe Review: Little Animals

“Do you think a story can kill us?”

Paul Ready asks one of the attendees at the memorial he’s staging in the midst of the Edinburgh Fringe. He asks because maybe a story killed his best friend: the one he told himself about who he was, and what the world was about.

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Little Animals—the debut play written and performed by Ready (presented by climate-focused theatre company Fern Culture and co-produced with Pentabus – the nation’s rural theatre)—is a remarkable solo outing, even by the standards of the Edinburgh Fringe. Set in the round within the unassuming, school-gym-recalling environs of the Lyceum Studio, the play takes the form of a eulogy. His best friend Richard is dead, lost to a river under ambiguous circumstances; Richard’s parents kept the funeral small, and Paul was not invited. In response, he’s hired a room during the Fringe to hold his own memorial to a friend he thought of as ‘his skin’.

There’s no fourth wall: if you’re in the room, it’s because you bought a ticket — if you thought it was a Fringe show, well, these things happen. In less able hands than the sensational Ready, it’s a premise that could go wrong in a rush. Instead, we are swiftly pulled into Richard’s life history, as seen through the eyes of his closest chum. It’s a cracking turn, perfectly judged at every moment, packed with complex, shifting emotion without ever descending into melodrama. Just as well: performed without set, lights, or sound, there is no theatrical scenery to chew, leaving the performance completely unvarnished.

The story he shares is of two little boys who grew up intimately attuned to one another, but destined for very different adult lives. Paul worked hard and went to uni. He didn’t become an astronaut, but now makes big bucks in the city whilst doting on his wife and child. For Richard, there’s no point to any of it so long as humanity keeps devastating the planet we share. To him, we are all so many ‘little animals’ in need of help, “because my home is being destroyed.”

A Poignant Meditation on Grief, Connection, and Climate Anxiety

The stories they told themselves were worlds apart, yet they remained bound by love. Without over-egging it, love plays a huge role in Little Animals. His and Richard’s journey reaches its lowest ebb when love is conspicuously absent — and vice versa.

However, Little Animals isn’t a play which gets lost in philosophising. Through anecdotes and reflections frequently bounced off members of the audience, Richard is gradually built into a living, breathing, invisible presence. Inspired, yet resistant to Richard’s fundamental ecocentricity, Paul pays tribute to his friend as only the closest of friends can. He wants you to admire his friend, to understand what made him so valuable, even whilst defending his own right to defy Richard’s philosophies to pursue his personal ideas of happiness and fulfilment.

Director Caroline Steinbeis shares equal credit for such a flowing, natural piece of theatre, which utterly negates the space between performer and audience. Ready’s debut script does well to replicate a formal tribute mutating into a stream of consciousness, and his delivery is so organic that it’s easy to believe he’s thinking it up as he speaks.

The audience will frequently be approached for validation, to acknowledge that Paul isn’t wrong for having lived his life for maximum personal satisfaction. Just because Richard rejected almost all domestic responsibilities to campaign for climate justice doesn’t mean he was a better person. Yet over the hour, that conviction proves less concrete than he thought. Has he been telling himself a story about the world that wasn’t good for him, or anyone else? Where do you begin to tell yourself a new story that isn’t too horrifying to countenance? Can you tell a story that doesn’t kill us?

Without preaching, this memorial veers into scathing analyses of a world economy based on exploitation, and of the cult of ‘I’ which has grown up as humanity’s relentless technological advance makes more ‘things’ available for purchase. Richard hasn’t spent his life preaching to the ignorant, but it’s one thing to acknowledge there are fundamental problems with society, and another to take some responsibility for fixing it. What can one human even do? Ready doesn’t claim to have the answers, but he’s quite sure that whatever it is, it begins with love.

Overall, this is a superlative piece of theatre, and one not to be missed if you get the opportunity.

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