The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
It’s the Economy, Stupid! is a London-born theatrical piece playing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland that derives its name from a phrase coined by a U.S. political strategist. Which is to say its central tenet—that our current economic system (capitalism) is deeply broken—is a worldwide problem.
The play comes to this year’s Fringe from London-based, Fringe First-winning company Worklight Theatre, and stars Joe Sellman-Leava and Dylan Howells, with direction by Katharina Reinthaller. The team thinks it’s a problem how little people actually understand the systems, people, and politics that run our economy. In fact, this play says, that’s kind of the point. The less we know, the more the ones in charge (read: the wealthy) are free to skew everything in their direction.
As evidence, Sellman-Leava, the primary lecturer (Howells is there to attempt to keep him “unbiased,” along with running technical elements from the stage) brings audiences some infamous moments in economic history. Such as in 2023, when then-U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak publicly stated the economy was in a downturn because students weren’t required to continue in maths classes through the age of 18 (an illogical connection at best and demeaning at worst).
Or, there’s Margaret Thatcher’s infamous Right to Buy program, sold as a progressive initiative to give middle class renters an opportunity to affordably buy the homes they were already living in—only for Thatcher to then direct the proceeds away from further housing projects and essentially create a housing market that has made ownership nearly impossible for what’s left of the middle class today.
Today’s capitalist economy, Sellman-Leava argues, is a stark byproduct that comes from prioritizing continual growth over all else. It creates a system in which, as he says in the show, one person winning requires everyone else losing. That never-ending growth has to come from somewhere, and it’s usually through the underpaid labor of the working class.
I’d argue that while many of Sellman-Leava’s details might not be front of mind for everyone, his eventual conclusions are pretty popular, at least amongst progressive circles. But what keeps It’s the Economy, Stupid! effective is the theatricality the entire team brings to a topic that could otherwise feel like a dry podcast episode or (shudder) an angry Twitter thread.
They’ve framed the conversation around a personal story of Sellman-Leava’s, how the recession of the early ‘90s saw big chain supermarkets pushing out more humble mom-and-pop operations, like the ones his parents owned and ran. In their case, that tale ends with their home being re-possessed and the family declaring bankruptcy. Hearing him recount the shame and embarrassment his parents felt—feelings they were only able to share with Sellman-Leave decades later when he was an adult—is heartbreaking, a painful reminder of the cost of big business’ domination. And maddeningly, the ultimate purpose of sharing his parents’ story is that in the ‘90s, they still had a pathway back to some semblance of financial security and happiness. Today, that pathway has all but completely vanished.
The piece also does a nice job communicating the importance of money and finances on a personal level, something that often gets lost when politicians are focused on the larger picture of billion-dollar relief packages and trillion-dollar budget deficits. Sellman-Leava shares how, as a kid, he would receive 50p spending money from his parents weekly, which afforded him a 48p Beano comic and a 2p candy—a pretty sweet deal for the amount of joy it brought. Then Beano ups its prices by 2p. Beano’s gets more money, but young Sellman-Leava is left candy-less through no fault of his own. Translate that into adult stakes, and the emotional toll of rapidly rising inflation become startlingly acute.
Sellman-Leava and Howells keep things from getting too bleak with a healthy dose of humor—they have a winning “bro” chemistry between them. Howells also performs small magic tricks throughout the show that are always fun to see. Will you see an elephant suddenly appear in a poof of smoke? No. But they add genuine delight and a lot of charm to what could otherwise be a heavy hour.
And Howells has his work cut out for him. When he’s not chastising Sellman-Leava for betraying his promise of being unbiased, Howells is moving one of the show’s many cardboard boxes that make up its set. This inventive and Fringe-y device sees boxes become projection screens, cartoon depictions of the politicians Sellman-Leava quotes (often with spot-on impersonations), a Monopoly board, and more.
That last bit is one of the most important. According to Sellman-Leava, their family copy of the popular board game was something of an heirloom, with his parents going so far as to hide it in a friend’s home when they knew that bailiffs would soon be knocking at their door to take possession of their home. Of course, Monopoly is a perfect metaphor for what this show is getting at. You literally can’t win the game without bankrupting every other player.
That is, unless you play with the original alternate set of rules designed by Monopoly creator Lizzie Magie, a version of the game discarded by Parker Brothers before started selling the game on a mass scale. In this version, the game ends when everybody gets a house—and everybody wins. It may be time to bring back that rule set in more ways than one.
I’m doubtful that It’s the Economy, Stupid! is going to reach many ears that don’t already agree with its main message. Then again, we often forget that we, collectively, actually do have the power to change that system, so maybe this show is a welcome dose of pathos in a conversation that can easily get bogged down by numbers. Getting the masses behind demanding major policy shifts requires a lot of inspiration, and the kinds of conversations It’s the Economy, Stupid! is dealing in are certainly inspirational. Let’s hope that’s not just wishful thinking.
It’s the Economy, Stupid! is running at Pleasance Dome’s Jack Dome through August 26. Tickets are available here.