Transfers
★★☆☆☆ Underdeveloped
theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) Fri 1 – Sat 23 Aug 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar
Arbery Theatre brings new play Transfers to theSpace on the Mile for a full run of the Fringe, tracking the movement of £500 through a group of people and the connections they make.
Ostensibly the story of a sum of money changing hands, Transfers uses this conceit to focus on the human connections, intentional or random, that occur each day and connect people to one another whether they realise it or not. The premise is intriguing, but the production does not quite live up to its conceptual potential.
The cast of Transfers. Pic: Arbery Theatre.
Conceived by Martin Foreman, devised by the cast, and directed by cast member Michael Robert-Brown, Transfers plays out as a series of vignettes. It opens with MSP Peter McAndrew (David Reynolds) in a cafe, laconic and uncaring in his interaction with French waitress Louise (Elsa Booij) who asks for his help in getting a visa so she can stay in the country with her daughter— until she threatens to reveal his affair. She gives him £500 in a brown envelope for his assistant, and the cycle begins.
The major problem with this cycle is that the £500 traveling through the play doesn’t always seems to be the same £500, disrupting its concept from the outset. The characters do cross over into eight interconnected stories, but some of these connection are much firmer than others, and the dominoes of these stories do not fall in a singular pattern.
strong performances
The performances in Transfers are generally strong, with particular highlights from Lewis (Damien Smith), a trans musician at odds with his mother (Ciara Hughes) over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling; Degsy (Robert Brown), a homeless man seeking to reconcile with his family; and Jamie (Jed Bury), a posh-appearing but actually struggling student.
Transfers deals with many pressing personal and societal concerns that could crop up in the lives of any of its viewers, working hard towards a message of universality, but is let down structurally. It surrenders much potential conceptual strength to the cramming in of too many unequally developed stories for its short runtime, losing track of itself along the way. With any luck the show will receive further development, allowing the whole of it to be as satisfying as its wink-nudge of a neatly tied-up ending.
Running time: 50 minutes (no interval).
theSpace on the Mile (Space 2), 80 High Street EH1 1TH (Venue 39).
Friday 1 – Saturday 23 August 2025.
Daily (Not Suns 10 & 17): 9.25pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
Arbery Theatre website: www.arberytheatre.uk
Facebook: @ArberyTheatre
Instagram: @ArberyTheatre
TikTok: @arberytheatre
X: @arberytheatre
ENDS
