REVIEW: Party, Edinburgh University Theatre Company, Bedlam Theatre Edinburgh ★★★★

Five middle class university students are having a party (meeting) and you’re invited!

Set in someone’s mum’s summerhouse (a shed) we watch five ignorant yet grandiose twenty something year olds with big dreams of saving the world becoming career politicians, as they try and agree on a name for said political party. With a very soggy but sold out auditorium, despite the storm raging outside, this production of Party delivers the Friday night good vibes its name promises, staying heavy on the laughs and light on the politics. 

Written by Tom Basden for its premier at Edinburgh Fringe in 2009 to critical acclaim, Party is as much character comedy as social satire, it’s primary purpose being to give five comic actors a chance to show us what they’ve got. And they sure showed us. Ava Godfrey, Live De Pury, Billy Hobbs, Sylvie McAlpine-Lee and Noel Chappell bring admirable aplomb to each of their roles. All of the characters feels distinct and humorously idiosyncratic, from the way they hold their bodies to their stereotyped accent choices. Even Roni Shaham’s bit-part as ‘Shortcoat’ delivers on laughs and pathos, despite the unenviable challenge of coming in cold to a tight knit group sketch.

As with most shows at Bedlam Theatre, the naturalistic set design is thorough and convincing, good enough to rival any Play Pie Pint production. A single bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling like a Eureka! Which feels pointedly ironic given this is a play lacking any Eureka moments of its own. Our well meaning but under researched backyard politicians are yet to have a single good idea between them, which is where this play draws its comedy from

The cast have such a great chemistry it’s easy to forget you’re watching a play and not just spying through the shed window on five friends getting on each other’s nerves as they bicker over non-fairtrade coffee and whether or not they can eat cake. It’s clear how much thought and care has gone into this production – and what a great time the team had while doing it! – from the gorgeously designed programme by Raphaella Bisset to Safa May Alli’s Director’s Note. (I for one and am glad director’s notes are making a come back.) 

2009 has never felt further away –  was it really pre-identity politics?! Or did Basden’s array of straight, white, male, middle class characters (save for the dumb secretary) mean there wasn’t enough difference of politicized identities for the characters to fight over? Watching this play is like opening a time capsule: remember when it didn’t feel like human civilization was on the brink of collapse? Imagine having nothing better to talk about with your political pals than whether or not you’re ‘for’ or ‘against’ Armenia, despite not knowing where the hell Armenia is. The Balkans? Maybe? (One of the play’s better jokes.) It’s hard not to reflect on how different political conversation on the street feels today, amidst debates about ongoing genocide in Gaza, AI agents’ rebel swarms and increasingly catastrophic weather events as man-made climate change worsens.

Safa May Alli defends the relevance of re-staging Party today in her Director’s Note, critiquing the political conversations she overhears as “replete with buzzwords rather than substance, sounding more like warring Tiktok algorithms than informed, empathetic, nuanced viewpoints.” It would be lovely to see some more of this clear directorial viewpoint in the overall vision of the play, which is currently a by the book re-staging. It was successful in 2009, sure, but what’s to be gained by returning to it now?  

If this production of Party is anything to go by, The University of Edinburgh’s student theatre scene is full of talent, enthusiasm and empathetic engagement with our wider world. One has to wonder what kind of cultural regeneration could be possible if these university students with so much time and talent to offer chose to do what professional theatres in Scotland are too afraid to: stage some new plays. 

Edinburgh is a UNESCO city of playwrights, teeming with groundbreaking, never before seen work waiting to find an audience. If you’re a student director, actor or producer who wants to be making work at the cutting edge of culture rather than reproducing what’s gone before, you can find your local friendly playwrights writing for @PenPalProductions, @hotmess.productions, @AndFriends.scot, @Page2stageed,@ScyllasBite and whole host of scratch nights from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Ask them to send you a script or two. You might find it’s more exciting than anything you’ve read on a school syllabus. 

Recommended Drink: A steaming mug of fairtrade coffee

Performances of Party have now concluded at Bedlam Theatre Edinburgh.