Edfringe 2026: Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche

★★★½☆ 3.5/5

Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche is a black comedy and historical drama set in the US in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. The five women call themselves widows and sisters. Together, they form a club with a mysterious, almost cult-like obsession with quiche. At first, we have no idea why.

I later learned that the whole idea for the script was born from the seemingly meaningless phrase “five lesbians eating a quiche”, and was then improvised and developed bit by bit into the version we see today. Well, that explains a lot.

The quiche is obviously given a heavily metaphorical and symbolic meaning. Made primarily from eggs, it becomes associated with female bodies and a kind of transformed state of femininity. Meanwhile, these five “widows”, who already seem to have rather strange connections with one another, eventually turn out to be mostly lesbians.

Yet even within this all-female club, the patriarchal power structure does not automatically disappear. Instead, a clear hierarchy emerges. At the top is the domineering Society president; at the bottom is the nervous, awkward Ginny, who carefully watches everything she does for fear of irritating anyone. The other three largely side with the most powerful person in the room: one occasionally tries to comfort Ginny, while the other two seem much more eager to please the leader and win her approval.

This hierarchy is firmly established until an atomic explosion takes place outside and the women receive some very bad news: they may be stuck there for the next four years, with only the limited food supply in the kitchen—and the last quiche sitting on the table.

From here, we finally get something beyond “sister society drama”. One after another, the women begin confessing that they are not really widows but lesbians—finally, the title makes sense. Meanwhile, the dominant leader falls spectacularly from her pedestal when it is revealed that she is pregnant.

Although the play clearly contains queer elements—two pairs of “sisters”, in particular, have obvious chemistry—it somehow felt to me much more like a discussion of power. When something resembling a utopian moment suddenly arrives, how quickly does the existing hierarchy collapse, and how quickly does a new order form to replace it?

The women are deliberately portrayed as exaggeratedly “feminine” in a very 1950s way: everyone wears colourful, hyper-feminine dresses, as though they have just walked out of a vintage shop. Yet the portrayal of female friendship and bonding sometimes falls into a strangely stereotypical kind of “girls’ drama”. I could understand this if it felt like a deliberate parody of those stereotypes, but for me, that sense of parody did not quite come through.

Perhaps, like Gertrude Stein herself, whose name features in the title of the club, the play is “queer” in a rather traditional way. I am not entirely convinced by all of its portrayals of women and queerness, but I still admire its use of metaphor, its absurd premise, and some of the genuinely funny jokes it manages to deliver.