Fractured, Underbelly Cowgate Review
A bare stage, a chair, and a woman trying to tell a story that keeps refusing to stay the same. Shona Graham's Fractured puts Eva on the stand after her brother drove a car into a tree while high, and then lets her account come apart in her hands - courtroom to kitchen to hospital corridor and back, memory arriving out of order and slightly improved each time.
Minimalism is the right instinct. A play about a mind that can't hold its own chronology doesn't need furniture, and Graham trusts the audience to keep up.
Eva is the reason to see the play. Graham has built a slippery narrator - withholding, embellishing, contradicting herself - who somehow never forfeits your sympathy, which is harder than it sounds, given unreliable narrators usually lose the room around the second lie. She plays Eva as someone frantically assembling a version of events she can survive inside, rather than someone lying to win.
The script needs another pass. The flashbacks that feel revelatory in the first fifteen minutes become machinery by the middle: we keep returning to the same handful of moments without the return delivering much, and the play sags in a stretch that mistakes repetition for accumulation.
Then the final ten minutes arrive, Eva's account collides with what the court has established, and the room stops breathing. It's a properly good ending, good enough that you leave slightly frustrated on the play's behalf.
A debut with bones, a strong central performance, and a middle that needs another look.
Fractured is playing at Underbelly Cowgate until 30 August
★★★
Written by Ellora for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
