REVIEW: Trans People Are Awful, Ros Watt, EdFringe 2026 ★★★★★

Believe the hype. Ros Watt’s horror comedy Trans People Are Awful has begun selling out, and for good reason: the vividly designed, dramaturgically well-crafted, and above all magnetically performed solo play is the kind that already feels like the stuff of Fringe legend.A genuinely thrilling watch, that turns from hilarious to gut-wrenching and back again in seconds.

Boy (Watt) is a trans man in northeast Scotland. We meet him as he turns on a video camera, filming himself in his garage and explaining to an imagined future audience what we’re about to watch him do. The framing device is perfect: it frees the narrative from any meandering first-person, present-tense exposition and cuts straight to the pressured chase of something being deliberately recorded.

Boy has a specific objective. To perform surgery on himself using dismembered body parts of cis men he has hunted via Grindr and murdered, and in turn, finally becoming the ‘real’ man he was always meant to be.

Sound designer Fizz Margereson’s dizzying compositions put us right into Boy’s headspace. Prop makers Roo Gehring and Matt Stevenson present a brilliant cavalcade of items populating the physical world. Vicious and crafty scrapbooks (‘People I Went to School With Who Turned Out to Be Flops’; ‘People I Went to School With Who Should’ve Flopped But Didn’t’) meet bountiful, legitimately disgusting examples of the aforementioned body parts. You’ll never look at a jar of pesto the same way again.

Trans People Are Awful‘s creative team lists a host of dramaturgical influence, featuring Jordana Belaiche, Rio Matchett, Jenny Bakst, Ellis Buckley, and Gemma Fairlie. This number of people tending to the vision of the play shows in its execution.

As Boy’s story unfolds in frantic tangents and unravels when faced with a chilling third-act twist, the script remains tightly balanced, no section overstaying its welcome and each plot thread pulled almost agonisingly taut. Watt and Co. share a sensibility with the work of queer body horror filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun in its neon-coloured suspense.

Watt is utterly captivating. Each move feels deliberate; we can’t look away, despite the tale getting increasingly gruesome. We don’t want Boy to get hurt, but we see how his twisted world view has led him to killing and mutilation. As we laugh along. we also confront our own boundaries.

By the unforgettable final stage image, this tragic character becomes one you will think about for a long time. Blisteringly funny, contemporary, and devastating, Trans People Are Awful, despite its protagonist’s violent nihilism, has a bright future ahead of it.

Recommended drink: Iced vanilla berry RedBull. Chemically, sweet, adrenaline-pumping, blue… (you’ll see)

Catch Trans People Are Awful at Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker One) at 15:20 (60mins) from August 11-30. Tickets are available through the EdFringe Box Office.