Imogen Andrews: The Unlikable Worms at Pleasance Dome Review
There is something slightly terrifying about having 500,000 followers before you have even made your Edinburgh Fringe debut. Imogen Andrews arrives at the Pleasance Dome with more than 300 million views behind her, a sizeable online following and a small army of surreal characters already living quite happily inside our phones. The question, inevitably, is what happens when you take something designed to last 60 seconds and ask it to occupy a stage for an hour.
The Unlikable Worms has plenty going for it. Andrews is a highly accomplished character performer, and her ability to create strange, instantly recognisable personalities is obvious. There are songs, sketches, multimedia, audience interaction and some pleasingly odd visual flourishes, including the obligatory 3D glasses. Because apparently regular theatre is no longer sufficiently immersive.
At her best, Andrews is very funny. Her characters have a specificity that makes even their most ridiculous behaviour feel grounded in something recognisably human: insecurity, desperation, vanity and an almost painful desire to be liked. The central joke is not really that these characters are unlikeable, but that they are trying so desperately not to be. There is something rather sweet beneath all the grotesquery.
The difficulty is that the show sometimes feels like an extended version of something that works brilliantly in miniature. Online, Andrews can introduce a character, establish their particular brand of social incompetence and deliver the punchline before the viewer has had time to scroll away. On stage, those same ideas require considerably more room to breathe — and not all of them have enough oxygen.
There are moments when the show feels less like a fully formed theatrical piece and more like an exceptionally talented social-media comedian working out which of her characters deserve their own hour. The ten-minute section where Andrews drops the characters and simply becomes herself is revealing: she is engaging without them, but the show doesn’t always seem entirely sure whether it wants to be a sketch show, a character comedy hour or an introduction to Andrews herself.
That uncertainty doesn’t make The Unlikable Worms a failure. Far from it. There is a performer here with a very clear comic sensibility and an impressive ability to make weirdness feel accessible. What is missing is the consistency and structural confidence that would turn a collection of very good ideas into a great Fringe show.
Andrews has already mastered the internet. The more interesting challenge now is figuring out what these characters can do with a whole stage — rather than simply giving the stage a longer version of their feed.
Three stars, but with the distinct sense that there is considerably more to come.
Imogen Andrews: The Unlikable Worms plays at Pleasance Dome at 21.30 until 31st August.
★★★
Written by Liam Arnold for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
