After the Fact
★★★☆☆ Nuclear nostalgia
theSpace @ Niddry St (Venue 9): Mon 24 – Sat 29 Aug 2026
Review by Tom Ralphs
Blue Bird Productions bring Nina Cattanach’s new play After the Fact to theSpace @ Niddry St for the last week of the Fringe, set in the 1980s, in a world still living in the shadow of the Cold War.
Inspired by the mother of a company member and her memories of a night in Peebleshire when the three-minute nuclear bomb siren sounded by mistake, After the Fact evokes an era when Frankie Goes to Hollywood topped the chart with a song about the possibility of the world ending as a result of a nuclear war.
Charlotte Bella Page, Abigail McDonald, Shannon Elizabeth and Carys Turner. Pic: Bluebird Productions.
After the Fact focuses on the lives of Orla, Julia, Leah and Verity, four women in their early twenties who each have their own reasons for uncertainty about what the future may hold for them. Orla’s imminent marriage is the main event that is dominating the women’s lives, while the cold war lurks ever present in the background.
Carys Turner’s production design, with a carefully chosen 80s soundtrack that includes the likes of The Primitives and The Cure, as well as Wham and the Human League, occasionally interrupted with messages about what to do in the event of a nuclear war, neatly bookmarks the two extremes in the women’s lives.
Julia (Charlotte Bella Page) is particularly traumatised by the prospect of nuclear war. Page opens the play with a passionately delivered soliloquy played out on an empty stage against a red lit background, that captures how the fear is dominating her life. It frames much of what follows as Abigail McDonald, Turner and Shannon Elizabeth, bring on a set consisting of foldaway table and chairs and slip into the characters of Orla, Verity and Leah respectively.
savage humour
McDonald and Page co-direct the piece, and all of the characters are effectively portrayed. McDonald gives Orla an optimistic, positive exterior while also capturing some of the doubt about whether she is doing the right thing and the other paths she could have taken that is hinted at in Cattanach’s script.
Turner gives an outward self-confidence and contentment to the already married Verity before she reveals the truth about her married life to the audience rather than her friends with a delivery that mixes anger and despair with a savage humour.
Leah is the most mysterious of the characters, with little revealed about her for much of the play. Elizabeth’s depiction of her works well in always suggesting that there is more to her than meets the eye and that there is something she is holding back.
However, while the script establishes who the characters are, it does little more than provide a snapshot of their lives. The three-minute warning constrains the story rather than adding to it, shaping and dominating the women’s lives more than it probably would have done, and limiting the opportunities for the characters to really develop outside of it.
It feels like there is more than enough here to make a good play that can work at any time without the prospect of mutually assured destruction hanging over it.
Running time: 50 minutes (no interval).
theSpace @ Niddry St (Lower Theatre), Niddry St, EH1 1TH. (Venue 9).
Monday 24 – Saturday 29 August 2026.
Daily: 5.25pm.
Tickets and details: Book here at EdFringe.com.
Tickets direct from venue: Book here.
Bluebird Productions website: https://bluebirdproductions7
Instagram: @blue.bird.p
TikTok: @blue.bird.p
ENDS
