REVIEW: Carpet Muncher, Jo Morrigan Black, EdFringe 2025 ★★★★★

Have you ever seen a cryptid in real life? What about queer cryptid with a wardrobe? …What about a queer cryptid with a wardrobe, a love of poetic verse and a lot to say about tragically unused tooth brushes?

Jo Morrigan Black’s solo spoken word drag performance – performed entirely as Mothman – is a exploration of late capitalism, homoerotic bro culture, quiet heartbreak and rebellious love, and an ‘intimate and frenzied call to celebrate the unknowable within us all’.

With the right lighting, and the right atmosphere, the Scottish Storytelling Centre’s George Mackay Brown Library can feel remarkably otherworldly. Black creeps into the performance space with immediate, electric personality, and the audience is immediately transported sideways into a world full of impossible things. With a few lighting tricks, a spotted coat, several layers of greys and browns, a couple additional sewn-on arms, a pair of upturned sun glasses, two feather antennae on a plastic headband and cleverly applied face make-up, Black is transformed not into someone dressed as a moth but into Mothman themselves. It is remarkable; it is eerie; it is wonderfully creepy. Those additional arms and the spotted coat create dark, dragging shadows across the black cloth background marking out the performance space as Mothman creeps around inspecting their environment with the jerky, abrupt movements of an insect considering their options. Black’s breathy, dream-like vocal cadence finishes the eldritch vision. Mothman is undoubtably in front of us, and they have a wardrobe full of clothes to discuss. 

This show is structured around the items hung on the clothes rail set to the side of the stage. Each item gets a different lighting cue, and tells a different story – both a clever storytelling device and also surely useful as a ‘memory palace’ device for Black themselves in this incredibly dexterous solo show full of linguistic twists and turns and dreamily complex prose. A thong invites wryly entertaining thoughts on ‘no-homo’ hotub bromances; a red dress produces reminiscing on painful heartbreaks; a high-vis jacket adorned with activist slogans invokes despairing rage: “has a single mind been quiet since October?” A twist of ivy brings to mind quiet sorrow at a friend gone too soon. A T-shirt conjures the image of a refugee centre where people are denied even the dignity of a single chair, Black pointing out that, “on the planes which fly back there is always a seat.”

The central motif of Carpet Muncher emerges as Mothman draws out an item of clothing designed to represent those who “do not belong in the dressing rooms”, and the central analogy becomes painfully clear. “Metamorphosis is threatening our children,” Mothman hisses in an uncanny imitation of TERF-bait hate. Children are in danger from “beetles, wing fairies and other filth”. People like Mothman are a threat. People like Mothman are too other to be allowed to survive. 

There is a lyrical, tangled brilliance to Black’s poetry. Carpet Muncher is full of lines like, “far above them in the sky, electric sheep are dreaming of androids”, the audience drawn into a world which feels like T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land with the addition of a fairy-light adorned wardrobe rail and a moth outfit. 

There is an unexpected burst of music near the end of the show, and this briefly included element works so well it feels like a missed opportunity that music is only included once. Even without this, however, the enticing strangeness of Carpet Muncher draws the audience in with the care and cunning of a cryptid considering their next meal. Fans of experimental spoken word performances such as Harry Josephine Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia will find much to love in this thoughtful, rageful ode to queer affection and defiant otherness.

Black vows that, “we will gather together the fabric of change”.

After seeing this odd, heartfelt, beautiful show, change seems just that little bit more possible. 

Recommended Drink: This show pairs well with a Rusty Nail: all tart bite and unexpected warmth. 

Performances of Carpet Muncher have now concluded at EdFringe 2025.