Highlights from Horror Festival
A review round-up from 2025's Edinburgh Horror Festival. Writing on King of the Scouts and Martyr Theatre's double bill, Sacred Hearts & Glenn and Flenn.
I was forunate enough to watch some shows at the 2025 Edinburgh Horror Festival. This longstanding event is home to some kooky alternative performances in the pretty kooky (is that the best way to describe it?) space of Banshees Labirynth. Whilst on hiatus, this was a great space for grassroots arts venues and I’m sure I’m not the only person excited to see it come back.
Glenn and Flenn in Rehearsal. Image: Frederik Bang.
Below are write-ups on paritcular highlights of the festival.
I was fortunate enough to watch some shows at the 2025 Edinburgh Horror Festival. This longstanding event is home to some kooky alternative performances in the pretty kooky (is that the best way to describe it?) space of Banshees Labirynth. Whilst on hiatus, this was a great space for grassroots arts venues and I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping for its return.
Horror is an interesting genre to make grassroots theatre in. Many of the best examples of horror work tend towards gestures that might be considered implausible in other genres. The logic of terror is much like the logic of the absurd and its void, or dreams and their ghosts. But to label work as horror is to make it appeal to a general audience, and it is from a general audience a young company can cultivate their audience, one that understands their intentions, identifies with their project and would urge it to continue.
When a consistently interesting lo-fi theatre company like Half Trick or Martyr Theatre are given an oppurtunity to devise work for this alternative, but simultaneously general space, it creates something unique and thrilling. Below are reflections on what were leaps for each company. Both of them crafted form-first work that was not only deliciously creative but riotously entertaining as well.
Half Trick Theatre’s King of the Scouts (****) was their first project written by company member Alex Medland. It is a work of remarkable modernity. How the digital age can be brought into the old conversation between the urban and the natural is much contested and even more difficult to incorporate into theatre – an archaic form. But even in this early iteration of her impressive script, this balance was struck perfectly.
James Jennifer Wright’s immersive multi-media was what pulled the work together. It meant the two actors onstage could mostly be lit by a projector, giving the whole piece the strange strain on the eye you might get from channel surfing or doomscrolling for too long. This is genuinely exhilarating as a question for multi-media theatre. Multimedia can show us different perspectives simultaneously, but could it also confront us with our (over)consumption of screen media?
In this case, you walked out of the auditorium simultaneously feeling like you’d watched a live performance, but also like you’d spent too much time doomscrolling. It was a unique feeling and one I think would be welcome in more contemporary theatre work.
So much multimedia even at scale feels timid. This projection got under your skin, and made the entire notion of a screen strange in the best possible way, a consumate achievement from Wright.
Caden Scott and Alex Medland impressed in two performances really willing to go to uncomfortable places. Scott was every bit the tyranically absent father, and had some really powerful monologues exploring kiwi-ness, modernity and nature. He was also a disturbing “Bear Grylls” as the play increasingly turned into the daughter’s hallucinatory fantasies. A moment Medland ate a fish, and another where Scott got his tongue cut out were meaty and visceral.
The script could certainly benefit from further development of its ideas, but not because they didn’t function here. Expanding its world further, even within the perfectly claustrophobic confines of the work is a natural next step.
Still, this was a wonderful piece of work using the full force of talent from the endlessly inventive Half Trick Theatre. This work of enormous potentiality was already a joy, and a horror. It must be put on again soon.
Martyr Theatre are an enormously exciting emerging theatre company based in Glasgow. They staged an impressive double bill at the horror festival. Over their first year as a company, they have produced no less than five full legnth plays across a wide variety of genres. Their work is aesthetically coherent, ruhtlessly economical and challenging to performer and audience alike. They are interested in lofty themes such as the failure of language and the nature of desire, whilst also being unafraid to descend into irreverent humour and intelligent kitsch. It is fresh work that takes its grassroots nature in its stride, whilst never treating its budget as an excuse to cheapen their work. Theirs is amongst the most complete work you can watch at grassroots level, whilst also being amongst the most fun.
In the Vault, Martyr Theatre enthralled with Sacred Hearts (*****), a gothic confessional which was visually stimulating and thematically rich.
The subconscious desires and psychosexual histories of two characters were framed through a confession, where Thomas, a priest, met Judith, who conducted seances. Judith believed she was possessed by the devil. She was perhaps instead “possessed” by God — and this ambiguity was the crux of Rebecca Russell’s script.
The text used horror as a form to go through rather than stick by. Tropes were used, but intelligently and to undercut or highlight. A confessional booth could easily have felt tired, but here, in a traverse staging, it became a key symbol of subjectivity.
Direction from Moira Hamilton and Russell herself was simply effective. There were a handful of elements that were all used with extreme intelligence. The aforementioned divide of the stage was a key part of the play’s early section, and further enhanced the feeling of ritual achieved later with a richly red tablecloth dominating most of the playing space.
Live flames were enormously evocative and utterly gothic, intelligently placed to complement technician Lexi Crockford’s broad blue lighting. Frederik Bang provided a stellar soundscape that created an intense sense of foreboding – present, but not intrusive.
Magnus Kelly was remarkable as tortured priest Thomas. Initially downcast eyes, a laborious breathing, an essential stillness were slowly transformed into a controlled frenzy, and the last five minutes of the play were a real coup for him.
Naomi Delvin also gave a powerhouse performance, and developed physicalities of possession with simplicity and skill. She commanded the stage for the majority of the runtime, whether entirely visible or in silhouette.
The play’s shift into a single-perspective ritual of prophecy, violence and sexuality was a luscious descent that set this work apart from the ten-a-penny piece it could have too easily been. It was instead a smart, tense work on psychosexual and theological themes. Martyr Theatre crafted a work where brilliance was conjured from almost nothing.
Martyr’s second show, Glenn and Flenn (*****), was a surreal, absurd puppet show that turned into body horror – for puppets! It was as ridiculous as it sounded, and that’s what made it insanely brilliant.
Frederik Bang wrote a script about a grown-up child actor, Glenn, and his old puppet Flenn – a Gielgud type forced into children’s entertainment. The early sections of the play were riotous and loose, egging the audience into participation, intelligently lampooning how patronising kids’ TV could get.
From the start, something was slightly off about the whole affair. Not just how outrageous Flenn was, but also how Glenn and Flenn’s “friend” Mr Ploughman, a puppet sandwich, was mouldy and decaying. Glenn’s top had outgrown him, and Flenn was wearing a very bad toupee.
It was with this set-up that Bang developed a formally ambitious romp which was hilarious until you watched it through the eyes of a puppet – which made it horrifying.
From the start, members of Martyr were each holding puppets – from the usher to the techie – and this gave the whole piece a unifying convention and an off-kilt feel. The cinema room was perfect for this work, with the white backdrop giving a real sense of a kids’ TV studio.
Bang’s direction was precise and prescient – mostly drawing out the sick humour at the heart of the show, but causing ripples of gasps when it needed to. His vision was clearly enhanced by the incredible puppets and props made by Moira Hamilton, whose fingerprints were all over the production. Her knack for creating brilliant plastics was what elevated this show to where it was.
Bang also wrote the music, and he played this live. The choice added texture to the piece whilst also allowing him to develop his own character with humour and grace.
The performances carried the show whilst adding individual flair. Lexi Crockford impressed in a physical performance where she was flailing around the floor loosely one moment and moving ominously with real tension the next, and her puppetry of Mr Ploughman was terrific.
Magnus Kelly genuinely stunned in a performance of incredible range and stamina as both Glenn and Flenn. His athleticism elevated the show to new heights and placed him as a really unique performer willing to commit to a role as demanding as this one. It was a feat to have a zoomed-out ridiculousness that became utterly tragic when zoomed in, and it was this duality that made his performance so special. His puppetry was also a delight.
This was the perfect example of a homemade affair with such formal ambition and imagination that it pulled off something truly special. You would have found it hard to see anything quite like this. It was fun, original, yet quite harrowing and emotional if you let yourself imagine with it. A hilarious, dizzying fever dream that left its enthralled audience walking out with a foggy mind yet clear images. It was fantastic.
Half Trick Theatre are back at Fringe with their (wonderful) shows THE FAUSTUS PROJECT and WAITING FOR WONKA. (I reviewed both - check them both out!)
And Martyr Theatre bring Glenn and Flenn back to Banshees for PBH Free Fringe this August. DON’T MISS IT! Follow them here.