Sweet
★★★★☆ Spirited and original
Royal Scots Club (Venue 241): Mon 10 – Sat 15 Aug 2026
Review by Julia Amour
Sweet from EGTG for week one of the Fringe only, explores a spirited and original tale of Edinburgh’s complicity in benefiting from the slave trade, and some of the women who stood up to campaign against it.
Written and directed by Hilary Spiers, the play centres on Nelly (Wendy Mathison), a wealthy widow in early nineteenth century Edinburgh flexing her new-found independence from her conservative husband, and Jeanie (Eloisa Frame), her clever and feisty maid.
Eloisa Frame and Wendy Mathison. Pic: Robin Mair Photography.
The production is beautifully through-composed, with Richard Spiers and Michael Mulligan’s set making ideal use of the surrounding neoclassical Royal Scots Club setting to evoke a regency era townhouse and the public platforms of its assembly rooms.
Mathison’s Nelly has a fierce intelligence, coming late to a realisation that her family’s wealth is built on the fruits of torture and cruelty, and with a newfound resolve to spread the abolitionist word and use her female influence to boycott slave-trade sugar in the city’s drawing rooms.
She is becoming older and frailer, however, so it falls to her maid and confidante Jeanie to bring a youthfully radical zeal to their campaigning. Their relationship is very sweetly portrayed, with a touching tenderness to the genuine intergenerational meeting of minds between the two.
invisible masses
Jeanie is the real heroine of the play. From the outset Frame directly addresses the audience of ‘posh Edinburgh folk’ (a fair assumption) to assert the dignity and power of the invisible masses, and unflinchingly defies Nelly’s son John (Alan Patterson) as he tries to bully his mother into silence and avoid reputational damage to his business.
The casting is impeccable, with all three actors delivering Spiers’ crisply-written verbal sparring with precision and commitment. The script strikes an excellent balance between authentic-sounding period dialogue and natural momentum. It also makes moving use of what appears to be real-life archive material, and Mathison is an expressive picture of shame when she reads this harrowing testimony to her son in an attempt to step back from open hostilities.
Alan Patterson – Robin Mair Photography.
The role of John could be at risk of going full pantomime villain, but Patterson deploys a well-modulated range of moods – by turns conciliatory, patronising, scathing, and finally threatening – to inhabit the character as a credible embodiment of the city’s vested interests.
Jeanie is given her finest moment when bolstering Nelly’s courage and debating how she should address a salon in Charlotte Square. There must be a bolder call to arms, Jeanie insists, and launches into a rousingly revolutionary speech about how the battle will be long, there will have to be sacrifices, and they will not achieve all their aims in one lifetime. Nelly is canny enough to take her advice, though toning down the talk of blood and bones to avoid scaring off the fine ladies of Edinburgh.
dig deeper
Successful as it undoubtedly is in its current form, there is an open question about how much further this advice could also be taken on board by the play itself: to dig deeper into the compromises it hints at around how enslavers rather than enslaved people were compensated for the end of slavery; and how Nelly’s wealth, and the wealth of the city today, still therefore benefits from that legacy of human misery.
This is a very apposite and timely play. It is to be hoped that it will be widely seen and its power multiplied, perhaps in dialogue with other efforts to uncover the city’s hidden histories such as those of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association.
Running time: One hour(no interval).
Royal Scots Club, (Hepburn Suite), 29-31 Abercromby Place EH3 6QE (Venue 241).
Monday 10 – Saturday 15 August 2026.
Daily: 6.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here at EdFringe.com.
EGTG website: theegtg.com
Facebook: @edingrads
Instagram: @edingrads
ENDS
