CHAMPIONS

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★

“cinematic, poignant, visually stunning, and deeply affecting”

We enter a large theatre space and take our seats. The stage is set as a living room: a single lounge chair, a rug, a vintage tube television, a retro stereo system, and an antique Victrola phonograph are the objects that define this memory space. Three walls form a trapezoidal domicile. A live projection appears on one wall, showing the performer, Andreas Constantinou, backstage, preparing for the performance.

The show begins. The house lights fade. The projection now shows Constantinou walking towards the stage. He enters the space and approaches a microphone positioned just outside the constructed room. The house lights fade.

Constantinou begins to speak of reflection, of his eighth performance of this work, judgment, critique, and the saturation of content during the festival. He expresses a desire not to compete, but simply to witness and reflect. Superscript subtitles appear: This is a personal story—yet the projection of these words also tells us that this story is public, transpersonal, and, in many ways, everyone’s story. Created in 2019, the performance was shaped—and later reborn—out of profound grief: the loss of one parent who died alone during the COVID-19 pandemic, followed five months later by the death of the other from a terminal illness.

Champions is a work of exposure and vulnerability. It seeks to uncover what lies beneath: fraught parental relationships, a father’s homophobia, and the experience of masculinity within a heteronormative world.

This is less a piece of traditional theatre than it is a work of significant performance art. A figure sits, reflects, witnesses, and emotionally records. At the same time, a series of memories, symbolic videos, audio recordings, and lighting sequences unfold across the three surrounding walls, the television, the Victrola, and the stereo.

Champions is cinematic, poignant, visually stunning, and deeply affecting. The domestic setting transforms into an art installation—a visual performance space that explores our most intimate emotional truths. It does exactly what it sets out to do: offering a raw, unfiltered portrait of identity, acceptance, and healing. It achieves this strikingly and beautifully, with an unclothed soloist performer, accompanied by lighting, sound, and projection that act as the kinetic corps de ballet of the piece.

We witness Constantinou’s journey through loss and reconciliation with his father. But perhaps more than that, we are invited to see a broader truth—one that reflects the experience of many queer artists who have struggled, wrestled, and ultimately triumphed over similar forms of pain.

We might have expected as much from the very beginning of this work, or even upon reading its listing in the Fringe guide. HimHerAndIt Productions tells us everything we need to know in the name alone. It is neither Him, nor Her, nor And, nor It. The poetry arrives when HIM, HER, AND, and IT collide—ontologically—in a way that creates a new language. It speaks to us from the spaces between these identities, the liminal zones of phenomenological experience.

Champions asks us:

What have you championed in your life?

What have you accepted?

What have you healed?

And most importantly:

What does it mean to be a champion of your own story?

CHAMPIONS

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Reviewed on 6th August 2025 at Pentland Theatre at Pleasance at EICC

by Louis Kavouras

Photography by Christoffer Brekne

CHAMPIONS

CHAMPIONS

CHAMPIONS