2025Edfringe Review: Edie

★★★★☆

"This is the reason why I came to the Fringe!"

Halfway through the show, I told myself.

The venue was not easy to find. Edinburgh is renowned for its labyrinthine geography. I followed Google Maps to the location it indicated, but still couldn’t spot the theatre—until I realised it was beneath me, tucked below the very bridge I was standing on.

After entering a dark underpass, I found myself in a narrow lane behind several restaurants. Chefs and staff were hauling bins of rubbish out the back doors—still, no sign of a theatre.

As I wandered back and forth in confusion, I finally saw a slow-moving line of people forming at the far end of the alley. That must be the queue! I rushed over and asked the last person, “Is this the line for Edie?”She smiled and said, “Yes—it’s hard to find, isn’t it?”

Following the line, we walked past a rubbish van and descended into a vault where a damp, earthy smell seeped from the walls. My expectations dropped. I thought, Surely no established actor would come out here to perform...

And then—I was hugely surprised.

Jessica Toltzis (who played Edie) was incredible. I had done my homework and read a pre-show interview, where she described the piece as “a love story framed in a legal drama.” Well—it was. But it was also so much more than that.

She was talking confidently in a suit, which hinted at both her lesbian identity through non-traditional gender presentation and her role as a senior manager at IBM. An efficient way of transforming through identities in her life.

The play unfolded through a conversation between two lesbians: The 82-year-old Edie, a lesbian who decided to sue the U.S. government after being required to pay an enormous tax on her late partner’s inheritance as she was not qualitifed as her legal "wife", and a 48-year-old lesbian lawyer who seemed to have little faith in Edie’s case. In real life, this landmark lawsuit ultimately helped pave the way for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the United States.

While convincing her lawyer, Edie falls into her memory of being a lesbian in the 1960s u.s., then transformed seamlessly into an 80-year-old woman. No grey wig, no exaggerated hunchback. Just a shift of the lips, a slight change in facial expression, and suddenly Edie was there, vivid and real. That is the wonder of Jessica Toltzis.

Later, we learned that Edie, in the 1960s, was young, not yet settled in love, but already accomplished in her career. She was one of only two women working as senior managers in one of the top five companies in the world.

The way the play explored the challenges of being both a woman and a lesbian was brilliant—conveyed not through heavy-handed monologues, but through clever, sitcom-style scenes. Scenes that revealed what Adrienne Rich’s concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” truly looks like in real life.

An accomplished woman like Edie—still single—seems both unbearable and inscrutable to her colleagues.

“Why are you still single?”

“Why don’t you date?” (Meaning, of course, men.)

“Are you being too picky?”

—each one chipping away at the young, smart, confident, witty woman trying to carve her place in a man’s world.

The actor delivers all these dialogues not through pre-recorded audio, as with the other character, but by responding to an imagined presence—a void. This choice leaves room for the audience’s imagination to fill in what the other person might be saying. Ironically, we’re so certain of the missing parts of the dialogue that it highlights just how familiar we are with these kinds of conversations—whether as lesbians or simply as single, unmarried women. The performance flows effortlessly from one moment to the next, delivering scene after scene with passion and infectious energy. The audience laughed out loud more than once.

The show dealt with brutal truths without lecturing. Instead, it placed those truths in painfully funny situations—like when Edie’s male boss and his wife showed up unannounced at her home, to avoid suspicion, Edie hid her girlfriend in the closet and gave a string of homophobic justifications to convince her boss that she was “normal.” Edie finds herself performing the very prejudices she once opposed, not out of belief, but out of fear—fear of losing her job, her stability, her place in the world. It’s a moment that’s both darkly hilarious and quietly devastating.

When the boss finally left and she argued with her girlfriend, it was in that moment that she realised:

It’s not my beloved girlfriend I should be yelling at—it’s the boss. The pressure within a lesbian relationship doesn’t come from the lover, but from power—from authority figures and institutions that make a lesbian feel ashamed of her passion, as though it were something nasty or unacceptable.

That’s how Edie became that Edie—the one who eventually sued the U.S. government.

It wasn’t a sudden epiphany. It was the accumulation of moments: laughter, arguments, sorrow, embarrassment, longing. Bit by bit, these layered experiences led her to ask:

Where is all this injustice coming from?

“She’s my wife, not my partner.”

It’s those who flinch at the word “wife”—those who deny Edie the right to name her love—that she finally decided to fight back against.