Courtney Büchner: One of the Girls at Pleasance Courtyard Review
Friendship break-ups are rarely given the same dramatic weight as romantic ones. We have songs for exes, films for heartbreak and approximately seventeen thousand Instagram quotes about letting go of someone you love. But what happens when the person you lose is your best mate? In One of the Girls, Courtney Büchner turns that surprisingly complicated question into an hour of playful, sharply observed comedy.
Büchner’s third Fringe show is built around friendship: the ones we lose, the ones that survive and the ones we haven’t made yet. Inspired in part by the experience of choosing bridesmaids for her wedding, there is plenty here that will feel painfully familiar to anyone who has ever opened Instagram and realised a former friend’s life has carried on perfectly well without them.
What makes Büchner particularly engaging is how easily she creates the feeling that she is chatting directly to you rather than performing at you. There is a lovely informality to her delivery, with the audience quickly becoming part of her world. She plays with the conventions of stand-up without disappearing up her own arse about it, and there is a theatricality to the show that keeps it from feeling like a straightforward succession of jokes.
The material is at its best when Büchner finds comedy in the tiny, slightly pathetic details of friendship. The awkwardness, the overthinking, the unspoken resentment and the strange reality of remaining digitally connected to someone you no longer speak to all get their moment. There is an especially good understanding of how modern friendship can make moving on almost impossible: you can remove someone from your life whilst still being able to see exactly what they had for brunch.
There is plenty of silliness, but beneath it is a surprisingly sincere examination of friendship grief. Büchner doesn’t attempt to turn every failed friendship into a villain-and-victim story. Instead, she allows relationships to have been both brilliant and ultimately unsustainable. People change. Sometimes they grow apart. Sometimes nobody has really done anything wrong. That is considerably harder to package into a punchline, and the show is stronger for resisting the easy answer.
At times, the show’s conversational style means a joke or idea takes slightly longer than it needs to land, and some of the more experimental elements feel less fully integrated than others. But Büchner’s warmth, comic timing and willingness to be genuinely vulnerable carry it through.
One of the Girls is funny, personable and refreshingly honest about the messiness of maintaining relationships as we grow older. You might laugh, you might cringe, and there is a decent chance you’ll leave wanting to text someone you haven’t spoken to in three years.
Just maybe don’t text them. They’ve probably moved on.
Courtney Büchner: One of the Girls will be playing at Pleasance Courtyard at 18.55 until 31st August
★★★★
Written by Liam Arnold for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
