A show still rooting through the pocket lint to find what it is.
What an excellent premise. Coatgirl is working the back-of-house drudgery of her ten-year school reunion, banished to the coat room while her peers enjoy the party. Rather than simply enduring the tedium, she takes the opportunity to rummage through the pockets of their coats, imagining the increasingly absurd potential experiences of the people attached to them. From bizarre objects and imagined scenarios to literally fishing for compliments, unintentional incendiary performance art, and confessions of early-life shenanigans that firmly belong to the late-night, keep-you-awake-with-cringe category, there is an enormous amount of comic potential here.
Secrets, Secrets, Shhh! has all the ingredients of a great show. The premise is genuinely intriguing, the performer is engaging and clearly possesses considerable comic ability, and there is a wonderful theatrical opportunity in having an entire world represented by the contents of a coat room. Unfortunately, the script lets all of this potential down.
The biggest problem is that the audience leaves the show having learned almost nothing about Coatgirl herself. The pockets of her peers become an excuse for a series of increasingly disconnected sketches, rather than a mechanism for revealing something meaningful about the woman doing the searching. Each object should take us further into her character, exposing a desire, a fear, a regret, or some uncomfortable truth about why she is still hiding in the coat room. Instead, the objects rarely amount to anything more than opportunities for another gag.
This makes the eventual departure from the coat room feel particularly unearned. We are told, essentially through her actions, that leaving signifies growth, but the character has not undergone enough of a transformation for that moment to carry any emotional weight. There is nowhere for her to go except out of the coat room, and that exit feels less like the culmination of a character arc and more like an indication that the show has run out of places to put her.
Perhaps most frustratingly, the premise promises that anything could emerge from those pockets. The possibilities are almost limitless. Yet the most imaginative items and scenarios offered are surprisingly lacklustre. The show continually gestures towards the surreal and absurd without pushing far enough into either. It feels as though the production has a much stranger, funnier and more inventive show hiding just beneath the surface.
Throw in several dreadful minutes of literal gagging, and the audience can find themselves actively rooting for the show to end. That is a real shame, because there is a genuinely excellent idea here and a performer capable of bringing it to life. With a stronger script, more imaginative use of the central conceit, and—most importantly—a character arc that gives the audience a reason to care about Coatgirl, Secrets, Secrets, Shhh! could become the show its premise promises. As it stands, however, the audience leaves the coat room with plenty of secrets, but very little sense of who Coatgirl actually is.
Show Listing: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/secrets-secrets-shhh
LISTINGS INFORMATION:
Venue: Buttercup at Underbelly George Square
Dates: Aug 5th -30th (exl. 17th)
Time: 15:45 (60 mins)
Ticket prices: £13.50 / Concessions £12.50
Fringe box office: 0131 226 0000 / www.edfringe.com
Suitable for 14+