EdFringe Review: Yes Person

There is something immediately intriguing about walking into YES Person at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Imogen Huzel sits quietly at the side reading, while Inka Pehkonen repeatedly crosses the stage carrying a framed picture. Around them sits a curious landscape of bananas, clothes, microphones and an almost aggressively cheerful spread of yellow. Before anything has properly begun, it already feels like stepping into somebody else’s very strange creative playground.

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Part stand-up circus and part performance art, YES Person takes the idea of “killing one’s darlings” and does almost the opposite. Discarded ideas are brought back and enthusiastically given another chance. Loud singing gives way to a unicycle; an absurdly extended microphone reaches into the audience before becoming something to climb. One strange decision tumbles into another, and the performers commit to the absurdity with admirable confidence.

The show unfolds through five loosely connected sections, including ‘Bird Disco’, ‘Being a Gymnast’, ‘Handstand’, ‘Live Drawings’ and ‘French Circus’. A microphone becomes a percussion instrument, handstands slip into animal-like movement, finger puppets multiply hands during a ridiculous “hand rap”, and somewhere along the way a framed picture turns out to be edible. Beneath all the silliness, Huzel and Pehkonen are clearly versatile performers, with strong physicality and circus skills.

YES Person at the Fringe: High-Energy Absurdity Meets Structural Ambiguity

Yet as the ideas keep arriving, unpredictability gradually starts to feel more random than surprising. Scenes generate a laugh or an impressive trick and then disappear before much has developed from them. At one point, Huzel draws Pehkonen while holding an impressive one-arm handstand; simultaneously, Pehkonen invites audience members onto the stage to explain their creative process and the origins of various props. Both moments are engaging in themselves, but the connection between them feels thin.

The same is true of the objects accumulating across the stage. There are plenty of memorable images, including Pehkonen swinging upside down while Huzel replaces the framed picture, then eats the original with a completely deadpan expression. However, the props increasingly feel underused. Rather than deepening the action, they often become another layer of visual clutter, with fascinating fragments competing for attention.

This is where the “say yes to everything” principle begins to work against the piece. Huzel and Pehkonen have an abundance of original ideas, a stylish visual world and the technical ability to realise some genuinely surprising ones. Their willingness to pursue something simply because it is funny, embarrassing or delightfully stupid gives YES Person its personality. But with so many ideas kept alive, the work struggles to find a strong core beneath them.

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