ADULTS at Edinburgh Festival Fringe – review

Celebrating its 60th anniversary as a world-beating theatre, the Traverse’s Edinburgh Festival has been heavier on laughs than on blistering social commentary. The impressive thing about ADULTS is that it manages to provide both. 

Essentially, however, Kieran Hurley’s new play is a sex comedy. There’s more than a whiff of the Whitehall and Brian Rix farces about a drama where a middle-aged man spends a lot of time in a ruffled, yellow shirt and without his trousers.  

The contemporary edge arrives with the fact that the participants aren’t vicars and philanderers in a mix-up of manners at some country hotel, but sex workers at a brothel where a middle-aged man has deliberately booked an appointment with a male prostitute to try to assuage the sense of emptiness in his life. 

The man Iain (played with rumpled sadness and embarrassment by Conleth Hill, best known as Lord Varys in Game of Thrones) turns out to be the former teacher of Zara (Dani Heron) who runs her flat as a sex pad. When he arrives early, he ends up asking how her parents are and then helping her change the sheets from chaste cotton to black satin, as she arranges a set of dildos on the sleek sideboard. 

Hurley’s previous play, Mouthpiece, was such a coruscating examination of middle-class assumptions about people they claimed to help. There’s fun along similar lines here as Iain patronises Zara about her wasted life, while she fights back with the news that she has got a first in English – and offers rigorous analysis of the children’s literature he sentimentalises.

“The Lion King is fascism,” she tells him. “Scar is a vanguardist revolutionary leader aiming to overthrow the existing hereditary monarchy and feed the hungry and the marginalised.” 

Talk of children and the difficulties of raising them with hope in a society that lacks opportunity threads through the action and when Jay (Anders Hayward) arrives for his booking with Iain he brings his child in a pram. Throughout, Hurley mixes tenderness with high-octane farce, sex scenes of wild embarrassment are punctuated by passages of deep sadness and tenderness. It’s when Iain accuses Jay of being a “bad dad” that the final crisis is precipitated, with everyone’s expectations and evasions laid bare. 

Director Roxana Silbert holds Hurley’s incendiary mixture of detailed dialogue, physical comedy and sentiment in a careful grasp and the performances all ring the changes with a lovely sense of reality however extraordinary their setting. Anna Orton’s set also offers a perfect balance between seediness and absolute normality. 

Hurley is a wonderful writer. His dialogue is so smart and witty, yet rich with empathy. The final sequence of phone calls before everything is temporarily resolved are brilliantly direct, and surprisingly moving. It’s a play about adults that sees the lost child in everyone, a farce about private lives that exposes the emptiness of the public sphere.