Megasquirt: Fully Loaded at Underbelly Cowgate Review
Whilst its polite to switch your phones off before a show Megasquirt: Fully Loaded feels like someone has plugged the entire internet directly into the mains and thrown it onto a stage.
Brooklyn comedy duo Ashley Blair and Drew Reilly make their Edinburgh debut with something that is part concert, part sketch show, part underground rave and part psychological intervention for people who have spent too long online. It is loud, filthy, profoundly stupid and much cleverer than it initially lets on.
The premise, if one is required, is an attempt to answer the ancient human question: how do I fill the hole inside me? The answer, apparently, involves bread, babies, burgers, bodies, gooning, a centaur boyfriend and quite possibly being squirted. This is not a show interested in moderation.
Blair and Reilly are Second City alumni, but Fully Loaded feels less like traditional improv than what might happen if a comedy workshop were left unattended in a nightclub at 1am. Hardcore punk, hyperpop and dubstep collide with dance, life drawing and original songs with titles such as Butt of the Bread and Gooning in the DJ Booth. The whole thing operates according to its own deranged internal logic, jumping from one idea to another with the confidence of people who have long since abandoned the concept of a normal thought.
And yet, beneath the gay brain rot, there is an actual point.
The show is interested in the things we reach for when we feel empty: sex, food, attention, intimacy, validation, parenthood, bodies and increasingly elaborate ways of distracting ourselves from the fact that existence is, frankly, a lot. The jokes are ridiculous because the underlying problem is not. There is something unexpectedly tender about two performers turning existential dread into a party and inviting everyone else along.
Audience participation is integral, although this is less traditional “let’s get a nervous man from row three on stage” territory and more a genuinely communal experience. Volunteers contribute suggestions and, in one particularly memorable instance, a heroic quantity of bread. The unpredictability gives the show a delicious sense of danger: you never quite know whether you are watching a rehearsed bit or witnessing two people discover a new problem in real time.
At midnight, inside Underbelly Cowgate, the whole thing makes perfect sense. This is exactly when civilisation has stopped making sensible decisions and Megasquirt is here to reward us for it.
It is puerile. It is cerebral. It is completely absurd. And beneath all that glorious nonsense is a surprisingly earnest proposition: perhaps life doesn’t need to leave you feeling completely fulfilled. Perhaps sometimes you just need to dance around the hole.
Come thirsty. Leave fully loaded.
Megasquirt: Fully Loaded is playing at Underbelly Cowgate at 23.50 until 30th August
★★★★★
Written by Liam Arnold for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
