REVIEW: I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar, Holly Redford Jones, EdFringe 2025 ★★★★

When was the last time you stepped inside a lesbian bar? Was it a beautiful experience, or one riddled with judgemental side-eyes and self-doubt? Maybe there isn’t one there to visit anymore. Maybe you’ve never been to one in the first place. No problem, as it turns out. Holly Redford Jones is here, and she has good news: we’re going to conjure our very own lesbian bar, right here, right now, dripping Underbelly Cowgate ceiling and strange basement noises be damned. Guitar in hand, dance moves at the ready, Jones takes us on a journey through what being a lesbian means to her – and what we might be losing through the lack of these physical spaces for queer women. 

Jones starts the story of her coming out journey with the image of her praying under the icon of the Virgin Mary, inside a church famous throughout her hometown Chesterfield for its crooked spire. The spire may be bent, but Chesterfield itself was not a welcoming place for a young queer person realising her own personal bends away from the ‘norm’ as she tried to navigate the oppressively cishet world of the early 2000s. Describing her awkward teenage attempts at blending in with the endless Abercrombie and Fitch bags, Maybelline mouse make-up and carefully ‘fat’ school ties, Jones perfectly evokes a by-gone age of Ugg boots, aggressively uniform fashion expectations and sweaty changing rooms with harrowing accuracy. (Her descriptions of this time period are immediately recognisable to anyone who also suffered through early noughts girlhood.)

Holly Redford Jones is incredibly gifted at weaving observational wit, light-hearted jokes and social commentary together to create her own unique style of music-infused comedy. Comphet is discussed, then there’s a Thomas the Tank Engine gag. There is a serious beat to acknowledge the horrors of homophobic misogyny and how it led to so many queer women losing jobs, custody of their children, and their bodily autonomy… then there’s a dance break where Jones commits to a glorious rendition of 5, 6, 7, 8 by Steps. Wryly describing her vibe as, “f*ck the patriarchy but quietly, with noise cancelling headphones on”, Jones is an expert at making herself seem instantly approachable. Easy charm emanates from the stage, but alongside the charm there is a formidable amount of pure skill to be seen in her performance of this show – both as a musician and as a comedian. 

The ending of I was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar arrives a little suddenly. The different aspects of the performance do successfully join together but with a faint feeling of haste, and if Jones leaned into giving the show slightly more space to breathe during that final section then the message of the show would land with even more weight. Regardless, this show is a joy to watch, a melding of music, memory and wit which will stay with you long after the winding steps of Underbelly spit you back out into the Edinburgh streets.

Holly Redford Jones shares onstage that during researching this show she realised that the lesbian bar she’s created in this Cowgate drippy underground cavern is, in fact, “the only lesbian bar in Edinburgh.” There are no others, now. Not yet, at any rate. What was built once can be built again. I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar isn’t just an ode to the past: it’s a rallying cry for the future, and an invitation to imagine that future in a way which is welcoming for all. There is no space for warped TERF logic, hate-filled slogans or tired toilet hysteria in Jones’s new wave of lesbian bars, be they imagined or built into real life brick and mortar.

Here is queer sapphic community, realised in all its most beautiful potentiality. A place of love. A place of acceptance. A place where we can all come together, be with each other, and simply….dance. 

Recommended Drink: For this celebration of queer sapphic culture, one drink comes to mind: the Negroni Sbagliato. (In the eternal words of Emma D’Arcy…it’s got Prosecco in it.)

You can catch I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar at Belly Laugh @ Underbelly Cowgate from now until 24th August at 19:25 (60 mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.

Image Credit: Dawn Kilner