An Ode to the Casting Director, Gilded Balloon Review
Reviewed by Michael Neri for Theatre & Tonic
Disclaimer: Reviewed with care, written with neuro spice. Please excuse any spelling or grammatical liberties — art is messy and so is my brain.
Some shows sidle onto the stage; Sophie Fisher’s An Ode to the Casting Director positively stumbles in—on purpose—offering the kind of endearing awkwardness you simply can’t fake. From the opening beat, she’s less “ta-da!” and more “let me just explain the mess I’m in,” which, frankly, is far more inviting.
The piece is an unvarnished valentine to the absurdity of audition life. We are whisked from cramped waiting rooms to the peculiar theatre of the casting process, via Fisher’s gallery of mortifying encounters and razor-edged asides. It’s autobiographical without the self-indulgence, confessional without the therapy-speak. Fisher’s writing wears its craft lightly—her comic timing weaving us through the story.
Her performance inhabits that deliciously precarious space between vulnerability and bravado. One moment, she’s the ingénue lost in a labyrinth of professional rejection; the next, she’s the master of ceremonies in her own miniature tragicomedy. The use of on-stage camera work is a masterstroke—turning the audience into the casting panel, complicit in the quiet cruelty and occasional absurdity of the industry’s gatekeepers.
The set is clean and precise—functional without fuss—though the array of lamps, while visually striking, sat in such close proximity to the audience that they occasionally delivered a jolt of unintended blindness. It’s a small but notable distraction in an otherwise well-considered design. Similarly, there were moments where I lost her—not in story, but in physical presence. The abundance of props and bursts of unnecessary movement sometimes pulled focus and left her less grounded in the space, with a slightly clunky delivery of words. In a show this intimate, stillness can be its own kind of power; refining these choices would give the piece a stronger spine and let the performance breathe.
The closing moments land with a lift—a reminder that, even in a business built on no’s, there’s an art to keeping your yes alive. I left with the giddy sense that I’d been both entertained and quietly galvanised.
An Ode to the Casting Director is a bright, heartfelt glimpse behind the audition room door.
Playing as Part of the Edinburgh Fringe festival at the Gilded Balloon Patter House – The Penny, 11:40 AM daily until the 25th of August.
★ ★ ★ ★
