REVIEW: Nose Job, Heads on Crooked, EdFringe 2026 ★★★

What do you do when your own face betrays you? Your literal face, that is, or rather a part of it. In this quirky drama, Heads on Crooked re-imagines Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 novella The Nose. Max Kovalyov’s nose hops off of his face, gains sentience, and becomes a tech billionaire peddling ‘Scentience’, a product that smells for you.

The story unfolds in snapshots, through conferences, livestreams, and brief glances into the Nose’s story. Three actors cycle through multiple roles and give energised performances to tell this strange story that certainly takes some twists and turns.

The theatre of social media is front and centre, as Scentience spreads through the internet like so many fads we’ve seen before. The performance takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to performing ‘influencers’ and Big Tech personalities, over-inflating the egoism of our media personas.

Nose Job had the performers act to the audience as if on a livestream, which made for really quite enjoyable and effective caricature, but was a touch over-used as a vessel for exposition. The Real Max Kovalyov is a shadow-banned live-streamer trying to expose the truth about the Nose (also going by Max Kovalyov) belonging to him. This obviously criticises billionaires in our real world that use online censorship to suppress unwanted narratives. It’s a clever parallel and a nice little allegory for how an idea can become suppressed.

There’s a lot going on in Nose Job, and it wants to make some really big points. Toxic social media culture, social fads, augmentation of our lived reality, vanity, wealth inequality… and a nose that really wants to be human, or maybe thinks that noses are superior to humans?

It’s very entertaining, but it suffers from having too many darlings still in play. The intriguing concept that Nose Job opens with is the Scentience technology, something that will filter scents for you so you never smell something bad again, or so that you will be able to smell who you are attracted to. It’s a fun premise, and especially silly when presented to you by a giant, megalomaniacal sentient nose.

Through censorship of scents and information, a succinct narrative of oppression emerges, and it is presented through funny dialogue and excellent, clean acting. This did not necessarily need to be supported by the subplot of the abusive boss relationship between Nose Max and his assistant.

There were a few instances of restating an already-made point that seemed to do nothing but fill time. The final scene also felt somewhat abrupt, and a strange divergence from the original novella that didn’t exactly drive home its purpose. Still, it was a good show.

The Nose costume was fantastic, and the actor made excellent use of physicality to express in lieu of a face. The comedic elements weren’t breaking new ground, but they were used to great effect and with acute, quippy dialogue. The infusion of social media was also performed with great creativity.

All in all, this was a whacky, fun, and biting piece of theatre. It takes a lot of liberties with Gogol’s original novella, but it reaches a modern and fertile ground with it’s story. Nose Job really has got a lot to give the audience, if they’ve got the attention span left to hack it.

Recommended drink: Whisky, neat – to deal with the grimness of it all.

Performances of Nose Job have now concluded at EdFringe 2026.