PIGS FLY EASY RYAN
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★½
“you can’t deny having an absolutely wild time watching the chaos unfold”
A technical hiccup with a set malfunction early on had me genuinely wondering whether it was part of the show… that is very much the territory we’re in here! NONSTOP’s Pigs Fly Easy Ryan, one of the three winners of this year’s prestigious Untapped Award, is messy, chaotic, and unashamedly absurd. Two plane crash fetishists pose as flight attendants to sneak aboard a flight, in a show that’s part physical clowning, part stream-of-consciousness monologue, part performance art fever dream.
There are moments where the chaos really works. As we enter the space, we’re greeted by two very overly-enthusiastic flight attendants, with sunburnt-red faces. What happens next is hard to describe. The two performers (Lou Doyle and Trevor White) crawl around on the floor or at other times leap on each other like overgrown kids in the playground. There are references in the dialogue to consumerism, capitalism and the climate crisis, with specific mentions of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I can imagine it being a really compelling pitch as part of the Untapped process, if nothing else for its downright absurdity.
But the anarchy isn’t always consistent. Some moments feel undercooked, with one particularly important speech getting lost under music that is just too loud. The humour, too, can be hit-and-miss. When it works, it’s genuinely very funny; when it doesn’t, it feels like watching a work in progress performance still finding its shape.
As the absurdity continues, the audience are genuinely baffled by what we’re all watching. We all get involved as the performers hand out pieces of cloud-like material and ask us to throw it in the air. A little later in the show, they strip down to their underwear and throw themselves down an inflatable slide on repeat. A video montage of various references to pigs in pop culture appears on the backdrop. It feels like it’s trying to tie a bunch of stuff together, but doesn’t fully manage it.
By the end, a couple of final lines stick: “Should we be flying right now?” and “We’ve been dying for a holiday. A break. A breath.” There’s a sharp idea here: weighing our desperation for escape in a modern world full of burnout and overworking against the urgent need for climate responsibility and a wider urgency to be taking action. But the show never quite commits fully to this idea. It feels like it wants to use the unhinged to explore these important points, but it only ever feels half-realised. Still, you can’t deny having an absolutely wild time watching the chaos unfold.
PIGS FLY EASY RYAN
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 9th August 2025 at Iron Belly at Underbelly, Cowgate
by Joseph Dunitz
Photography by Alex Brenner
