Plano
★★★★★ Thrilling microcosm
Royal Scots Club (241): Mon 10 – Sat 15 Aug 2026
Review by Julia Amour
Plano, presented by Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group for EdFringe Week One, feels like David Lynch, Tennessee Williams and Luigi Pirandello formed a fractious throuple in some netherworld multiverse. That is meant as high praise, just don’t expect the play to make any Newtonian kind of sense.
The 2018 script by Will Arbery – Pulitzer prize finalist and occasional Succession writer – is a dense, queasily funny psychodrama directed with fearless panache by SaraBeth Samuels (with assistant director Trudy Kalvynaite).
Olivia de Pury, Aspen Ashworth and Hannah Fitzpatrick with Ben Black. Pic: Robin Mair.
Looping and jumping in time, Plano tracks the claustrophobic lives of three sisters: Anne (Hannah Fitzpatrick), Genevieve (Aspen Ashworth) and Isabel (Olivia De Pury).
The three are talking on the porch of Genevieve’s family home when Anne announces she’s pregnant by a Latino guy she met at the grocery store.
In the first of many jump-cuts, Anne is suddenly very pregnant and married; her sisters are starting to warn about the motives of her new husband Juan/John (Anna Chirumbolo); and Isabel is moving to Chicago to help poor people for a Catholic non-profit, but promises not to become a nun because she’s too hot.
whipsmart and intelligible
The pace of dialogue is ferocious – like life rushing past in an unstoppable, unknowable torrent – and as the three sisters, the actors do an incredible job of keeping the lines whipsmart and intelligible, as well as establishing the fiercely protective bond between them.
Even when you only half-hear something, as when Genevieve’s husband Steve (Michael Aaron Flynn) gabbles that he has a shameful secret and their marriage won’t last a year, it’s both theatrically absurd and perfectly resembles how people do drop truth bombs at family gatherings.
Olivia de Pury, Hannah Fitzpatrick and Aspen Ashworth, with Ben Black, Michael Aaron Flynn and Anna Chirumbolo. Pic: Robin Mair.
While the women try to hold things together and work on their persistent sadnesses and illnesses, the male characters disappear off to nearby but impossibly distant Plano where they get to live out other lives.
In a twist towards body-double horror, a second Steve starts turning up at the family home alternately timidly needy and vengefully violent – and Flynn’s transitions between frustrated family man and lumbering doppelganger are both comic and threatening.
A couple of firecracker scenes also give Anna Chirumbolo centre-stage to shine within an extremely strong cast, as the enigmatic Juan/John. His emotional distance allows him to be clear-sighted and candid about his failings as a husband and his choice to keep other selves hidden, whether they’re dishwashers working 16-hour days, or Saturday night cowboys cruising in Plano.
De Pury as Isabel, the sister radiant with hallucinatory piety, convinces in challenging movement work suggesting illness and/or possession; while Ben Black is genuinely menacing as the omnipresent Faceless Ghost who becomes her incubus, bodily draining the life from her.
terrifyingly weirder
All of this suggestive horror is fully realised with a simple palette of materials – plastic sheeting, white gauze, red thread – and the eerie sound and lighting design of Jim Brandom and Gordon Hughes.
Anne has a theory for why things feel so weird: the family is cursed. So she eventually starts praying for her mother (Linda Orr) and things only get terrifyingly weirder. Mothers, as we are reminded by the Greek tragedies recalled in the play’s climax, are not always motherly.
Orr brings the necessary distracted self-centredness to this matriarch, and her surreal coup de theatre reveals the controlling obsession that has damned her daughters to these lives of fractured self-doubt, and perhaps even worse hinted-at trauma.
It is thrilling to see this accomplished, multilayered production as part of Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group’s 2026 Fringe season, and should be a must-see for audiences who care about innovative contemporary drama and local talent.
Running time: One hour and 20 minutes (no interval).
Royal Scots Club, (Hepburn Suite), 29-31 Abercromby Place EH3 6QE (Venue 241).
Monday 10 – Saturday 15 August 2026.
Daily: 9.15pm.
Tickets and details: Book here at EdFringe.com.
EGTG website: theegtg.com
Facebook: @edingrads
Instagram: @edingrads
ENDS
