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Edinburgh Reporter

Fringe 2025: Cold, Dark Matters ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Well this isn't quite what I was expecting. Cold, Dark Matters is billed as a play about 'moving to rural communities, and the dangers of obsessively fitting in. 'I think I imagined a sad tale of an incomer ('emmet' in Cornwall) trying to join local activities and being given the cold shoulder. Cold, Dark, Matters takes 'fitting in' to far more Gothic levels than that. It's a clever, funny, very well acted show that leaves you wondering just what you've seen and whether the truth of it lies anywhere at all. Jack Brownridge-Kelly bounds onto the stage. He's going to tell us a true story about an acquaintance, a writer called 'Colin'. Colin's very successful series, The Lady and the Stone, is set in the area of Cornwall to which he's recently moved. Being somewhat lonely and isolated, he has decided NOT to join a book group, but instead to turn the old shed he sees from his kitchen window into the focal point of community allotments. When he meets Jago, a local and somewhat mysterious man, and Jago tells him that the shed will ultimately be blown up because his mates like doing things like that, Colin jumps at the chance to get involved in what he hopes is some sort of Pagan rite. He shuns the advances of the rather posh and somewhat lascivious Ethel, who's keen to get him to join in with rather more normal pursuits like choral singing and open water swimming. Colin's much keener on the idea of blowing up sheds; he ascribes all sorts of bizarre motives to Jago's 'hobby', but really he thinks getting in with Jago's friends will make him part of the cool gang. Jack Brownridge-Kelly plays each of the parts in the show with notable skill. A Cornishman himself, he can switch from Jago's deep local burr to Ethel's silky smooth tones and back to his own more neutral voice without missing a beat. He's also great at conveying Colin's over-enthusiasm, his almost childlike excitement when he thinks he's found an 'alternative' friend. When Jago takes Colin to a rave in an industrial unit, Jack's drug-fuelled dancing is a joy to behold. Again and again, Colin rejects the idea of writing a new book, or even talking about his work to one of Ethel's groups. He's done with writing, he wants to experience 'something real!' But is anything real in this story? And which story are we even in? As Jago embroils the willing Colin in more and more shed-based intrigue, it's hard to tell whether he's a wind-up merchant or something much more sinister. Jack plays with our minds just as Jago toys with Colin's, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to tell us more about the misguided writer. He was lonely, he was sad, but he wasn't a stupid person. Like incomers in any traditional area, he just wanted to belong. When Jago persuades Colin to set fire to the shed as a form of initiation, Colin is sufficiently invested in the whole idea to do as he's told. It is then that Cold, Dark, Matters moves into considerably darker territory, and Colin finds himself up to his neck in trouble. Yet once again Jack pulls the metaphorical rug from under the audience's feet. He has found Colin's manuscript, a record of the story Jack is now telling. He's not only read it, he's edited it, 'I made it my own.' The manuscript is unfinished, but Jack has, he says, a special surprise for us! We – and he – are at last to find out how Colin's story ends. Someone has just sent Jack an audiofile of the 'Real Ending.' But again we are thrown off course. We think we know what happened to Colin, but then…. Cold, Dark, Matters can be enjoyed on several levels. As a creepy story about a community at the edge of the world; as a study of isolation, and the lengths to which a lonely person might go to end it, or as a comment on the tensions caused when city people move into rural areas and try to impose their own fantasy versions of the countryside (allotments!) on people who are struggling with rural poverty. Cold, Dark, Matters can also be seen as an homage to the artist Cornelia Parker's 1991 work Cold, Dark, Matter: An Exploded View. Jack has said in an interview* that Parker is his favourite artist, and in the play he references Parker's own words when he describes the shed as a repository of people's junk. In Parker's work, a shed is blown up by the army, its surviving pieces used to make a suspended installation (just as the shed in the play is represented by a minimalist wooden structure hanging from the ceiling.) 'The safe place, the place of secrets and fantasy'** is destroyed. Colin craves excitement and change; he doesn't want to write the same old books, he doesn't want to join a choir or go swimming, instead he seeks a radical departure from conventionality. But when he dips his toe into that particular water, he isn't quite ready to cope with what he finds there, and he's suddenly all too willing to seek comfort in Ethel's book group. Cold, Dark, Matters is a very entertaining play, and one that will keep you guessing right to the end and long after it. Cold, Dark Matters, directed by Roisin McCay-Hine, is at C ARTS | C venues | C aurora (studio), 28 Lauriston Street (Venue 6) at 2.25pm every day until 8 August. * March 2024 **Tate Modern website, unattributed Like this: Like Related