EdFringe Review: Play Dead

Betyl Theatre’s debut production by Bailey Edwards, Play Dead (staged at Underbelly Cowgate), is a story about obsession told by a psychologically damaged young man, Echo, with malformed ideas of love. Played with shining-eyed, unstable charm by Edwards himself, Echo is introduced after a crushing breakup. Deluded by fiction and drunk on an almost sociopathic self-regard, he’s decided the only logical course of action is to steal his ex’s dog—an unfortunate hound named Scotland. In an act part revenge, part ploy to break a wall of ‘no-contact’ via grand gesture, we join him alone with a dog crate, a mess of audio equipment, and an endless supply of grapefruits.

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While waiting for his ex’s inevitable call, Echo uses fourth-wall eye contact and sharp comic timing to endear himself to the audience—dancing to automated phone menus, carnally ripping into grapefruits, and recounting memories of a childhood home marred by drug addiction and infidelity. In his mind, the breakup has been recast as a grand, classical tragedy, the pain mythologised, and loaded with dramatic weight that excuses the real-world harm as either art or fate. It’s a frighteningly immature view of the world, and cursed with the egocentrism that children grow out of when mentored properly.

Edwards has, very skilfully in word and performance, created a monster who learned early how important it was to be likeable, but not how to like or love anyone else. Instead, he is an unfillable pit of need, doomed to imprint on his partners and lacking the ability to move on. Those who’ve never met such creatures may fall for him on first acquaintance, but the more experienced in the audience will see the red flags flying from the start. Yes, he’s terribly funny and oh so lovely, but it’s all a means to an end.

A Modern Metamorphosis: Myth and Obsession in Play Dead

Having driven away his sister (who made the mistake of trying to give him a reality check), he conjures an imagined ‘her’ from the dog crate. Sylvie Field is brilliant in the part, at first voicing the grounded good sense his sister has tried, and failed, to impart, before morphing into a vituperative ghost goading Echo to embrace his worst instincts.

She’s almost a Greek chorus. How apt for a show that draws overtly from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the story of Echo and Narcissus—channelling the temporal trap from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, where grief registers as both ‘now’ and ‘again’. In classical myth, the nymph Echo is stripped of independent speech and ignored by Narcissus until she wastes away, and he is cursed to be a flower. It’s a story our Echo will revisit from time to time, perhaps seeking validation, or maybe confirmation that tragedy is inevitable. So, his room becomes his cave, the silent ex is the unattainable Narcissus, and Echo’s ever more manic monologue is a doom loop he will not escape until he dissolves. It’s a smartly implemented narrative spine, though occasionally lost as Echo’s monologue veers sideways in pursuit of a laugh or exposition.

Play Dead would be a gripping journey into calamity if left to actors and text alone, but director Mia Hull weaves quite the nightmare from this antihero’s journey inside the subterranean vault of Iron Belly. Scattering the room with grapefruits to transform a sparse Fringe set into Echo’s mythic cave, Hull pushes Edwards to an ever more physically charged performance. Ellie Isherwood’s ambitious sound design—layering live vocal distortion, looped dialogue, and mounting feedback—allows this violently vivid self-exposition to fill the claustrophobic room Echo cannot escape with even greater force.

It’s an excellent piece of theatre, and particularly admirable in giving over the stage to a deeply unlikeable individual, without feeling the need to make them at all redeemable. Instead, it offers a salutary fable, warning of the dangers of unquestioning self-validation and of cutting ourselves off from loved ones when they come bearing uncomfortable truths.

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