Alone at Assembly Box, George Square Review
Alone is a two-hander sci-fi thriller written by Luke Thornborough and performed by Courtney Bassett and Kat Glass, and it is one of the tensest hours you will spend at this year's Fringe.
The setup: Jessica Holland and Sarah Taylor are aboard a spacecraft on a mission to extract microbes from soil that could save a dying Earth. Holland is a brilliant pilot; Taylor is an equally brilliant scientist who has spent her career being overlooked and talked over, and a woman of deep religious faith. As the ship begins to fail in real time, so does their trust in each other, and the play tightens like a fist around both the ticking clock and the personal fractures between them.
The venue deserves its own credit. The Box at Assembly George Square is, quite literally, a shipping container, and the choice is inspired. The metal walls press in, the claustrophobia is real rather than suggested, and the audience is made to feel jarringly, frighteningly part of the story, less spectators than a silent third crew member with no say in what happens next. The fear in the room is palpable.
What impresses most about Thornborough's script is how scientific it feels without ever locking the audience out. The microbiology, the mission logistics, and the mechanics of a failing ship all ring true, delivered with a specificity that makes the stakes feel credible, yet it stays completely accessible. It's the same trick Andy Weir pulls off in Project Hail Mary, and there are echoes too of Ray Bradbury's Kaleidoscope in the play's existential dread - but where those works reach for the cosmic, Alone stays devastatingly intimate.
Bassett and Glass are superb: taut, truthful, and generous with each other even as their characters turn on one another. The real-time structure gives them nowhere to hide, no blackouts to reset in, no scene changes to breathe through, and neither of them needs it.
Beneath the thriller mechanics runs something angrier - a play about the silencing of female voices in STEM, about climate collapse, about the search for meaning in the face of mortality, and about what survival actually costs. One line refuses to leave me: "This bacteria may save our planet, but someone somewhere will just find some new way of killing it again."
Gripping, emotional, and deeply relevant, Alone is sci-fi at its most human. Go and sit in the metal box. Let it frighten you.
Alone runs at Assembly Box, George Square, until 30 August (not 24)
★★★★★
Written by Ellora for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
