REVIEW: Shell, Ana Evans and Linnea Scott, EdFringe 2025 ★★★★★

This show is pure queer excellence.

Shell introduces us to Andy, your classic Jock, teaching us the important guide to BRO, Break Reproductive Oppression. He guides us through a beautiful queer-inclusive sexual education lesson, telling us that we are there to change our lives, testing us on our knowledge of anatomy, getting it wrong, but correcting himself and eventually getting it right. We also meet Peanut, powerful, tiny, and hungry for desire.

As we enter the theatre we are given a sheet of paper and invited to write down something we have always wanted, no matter how unrealistic. Peanut eats up our desires, empowering us to the future we have always wanted as individuals in the audience.

This show is a masterclass in audience interaction, from getting us to draw on paper to drawing on us with washable marker, it is utterly, beautifully stunning.

Ana Evans is beyond talented, switching between the two characters and giving an outstanding mix of drag king glory and true sentimentality. They explore the understandings of our physical bodies, while deconstructing the binaries and begging to know what we truly want, who we truly are, beyond our physical selves.

In a moment that brought such beautiful trans pride to my heart, Peanut writes across the back wall of the theatre “I want to heal the boy inside me”, a moment that resinated so deeply with my little trans self, the role that the world has created for me and the desire to be truly, wholy, healed as myself.

The piece ends with Ana using the audience to recreate exactly what they have always wanted, to be a rockstar, lipsyncing to Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses, asking the audience to associate this song with them forever, which I for one will. They sign audience arms, get the audience to chant their name, blow wind in their hair, have the audience flash them and are carried around the venue. It is an utterly stunning and deeply memorable end to one of the greatest performances I have ever seen.

Shell begs you to break out of your own shell that has been created for you by the way you are born into society, and live truly, freely and queerly as yourself.

Recommended Drink: Pair this with a Protien Shake and Peanut Brittle.

Performances of Shell have now concluded at EdFringe 2025.