REVIEW: Identity Theft: What to Expect When You’re Unsuspecting, Stolen Table, Edinburgh Fringe 2025 ★★★★

This “seminar” promises to save you from identity theft by giving you a taste of it first. In Identity Theft: What to Expect When You’re Unsuspecting, Agnes Carrington’s Bernadette DuProbe leads a corporate crash course in fraud prevention that’s equal parts absurd workshop and clown show. It’s the rare comedy hour that feels like mandatory training and is somehow delightful.

Using the format of a workplace workshop, Carrington skewers jargon‑heavy self‑improvement culture while immersing us in a heightened corporate world. Her “informative, interactive, luxury seminar” is less a warning about online safety than a send‑up of the endless PowerPoint and acronyms of modern office life. It’s firmly on the side of playful nonsense rather than applicable tools if any readers were looking for advice on internet security. 

Bernadette skips up and down the venue lanyard on with a sing song of good morning on her lips as we enter. Over the next hour she leads us through phishing‑scam role‑plays, accidentally shares her own incriminating Google search history and recruits unsuspecting volunteers for hands‑on demonstrations. Each bit escalates until a left‑field twist reframes who has been teaching whom, echoing the promise that we’ll “practise identifying identity theft by having it stolen”. My highlight came when an audience member in a horse mask was hidden among us- a visual gag that had me crying with laughter.

Carrington’s solo turn is both brittle and infectious. She thrives on crowd work, corralling volunteers into her schemes with faux‑motivational energy. There are occasional passages where she leans into dense corporate jargon and the momentum sags, yet the overall pacing is brisk (apart from structured breaks- key for office life) and the low‑fi production never trips her up. The show is neatly structured, with a dramaturgical twist near the end that’s genuinely delightful for a clown‑based piece.

For a Free Fringe hour, this is smart, strange and sharply executed. Dry, daft and disarmingly immersive… a corporate seminar where the real data breach is your dignity.

Recommended Drink: water cooler water in one of those cone cups that starts to leak at the bottom. 

Side note: Outside of the review, it’s worth noting that Carrington neatly incorporated asking audience members’ pronouns into her interactions. It was done in character, felt respectful rather than didactic, and was a small but welcome reminder that inclusion doesn’t have to derail a joke.

Catch Identity Theft: What to Expect When You’re Unsuspecting between 2nd–12th August at 21:45–22:45 at PBH@Globe Bar. Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.