FLICK
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★
“Nunn’s performance is magnetic; she’s endlessly animated, holding the room as if we’re her closest confidants”
Madelaine Nunn strolls onto the stage in her teal scrubs, beaming like she’s about to let you in on a juicy secret. She’s a palliative care nurse, used to looking after elderly patients, until one day a new admission catches her off-guard. PhD candidate Mark is young, good-looking and, as much as she tries to be professional, she can’t help how attracted she is to him. After doing him a small favour, this quickly escalates into something much darker, and goes to places you probably wouldn’t expect.
It’s a tricky piece to talk about without giving too much away. Nunn’s performance is magnetic; she’s endlessly animated, holding the room as if we’re her closest confidants. Her warmth and wit make it almost impossible not to root for her, even as her actions tilt from questionable to downright alarming. There’s an interesting gender thing at play as well, and it’s hard to believe if the genders were swapped that we’d be viewing any of the character’s decisions in the same light.
The central story is actually quite slim, and could itself be condensed into a much shorter play, but Nunn peppers the journey with tangents about colleagues, other patients, and hospital life. Some of these feel like narrative detours, others lean into moments of image-rich comedy with recurring points.
The tonal shifts are where Flick really thrives. Director Emily O’Brien-Brown balances the humour and menace with care, so when the big twist arrives, it lands with emotional force. A scene lit with soft, warm light gives us a glimpse of the character at her most vulnerable, transforming her from chaotic rule-breaker to someone carrying a grief so heavy it shapes every decision she makes.
Sound designer Christian Biko adds a curious texture to the world, with plucked strings underscoring moments with an off-kilter tension. It’s perhaps the one element of the show which doesn’t necessarily best serve the moments when it appears, but it certainly adds to the unease simmering beneath the comedy.
When the big reveal happens, we suddenly realise that this is an entirely different story to the one we’ve been following. What starts as a fairly light comedy slips into something much darker, and then into something incredibly sad. That Nunn is able to keep us on side throughout all of this, and play the weight of the underlying grief as effortlessly as she does the humour in the build-up, is a real credit to her as a performer.
Flick does that brilliant thing of taking a really sad and serious theme and finding a way of turning it into a story filled with chaos and humour. It’s a clever vehicle, and makes for a really entertaining hour of storytelling.
FLICK
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 9th August 2025 at Red Lecture Theatre at Summerhall
by Joseph Dunitz
Photography by Darren Gill
