Rip Her To Shreds, Underbelly Cowgate Review
Hell hath no fury like a college girl dumped, and Rip Her To Shreds knows it. Isabelle Barbier's horror comedy drops us into a Salem dorm room somewhere in the mid-2000s, where wannabe queen bee Beth has just been traded in for a shinier freshman, and her roommates Mercy and Bo are on hand to help her process the grief in the healthiest way available to three unravelling young women: obsession, rivalry, and a light dabble in the occult. It's a delicious premise. The trouble is that the show never quite decides what to do with it.
It takes a long while to get going. The opening stretch leans hard on dorm-room chatter that establishes the girls' dynamic but little else, and by the time the supernatural finally seeps in, the piece has burned through a lot of goodwill. When it does arrive, the witchcraft comes with no rulebook whatsoever. Beth whips up a concoction halfway through that is heavily implied to have magical powers, and then the script simply does not address what they are. This is the show's fundamental problem in miniature: the rules of this world are never properly established, so every new development arrives out of nowhere. There's no dread in watching things escalate when nothing was ever set up to escalate from - surprise without foreshadowing isn't a twist. By the time the final stretch descends into full feral frenzy, the wildness feels unearned rather than inevitable.
The comedy struggles too. There are jokes here, and you can see the shape of the laughs the show is reaching for, but most of the humour simply doesn't land. The glowing exception is Mercy, who is very, very funny: a chaos agent with impeccable instincts who hoovers up what laughs there are, often in scenes that technically belong to somebody else.
And that points to the frustrating thing: the actors are great across the board. They deserve a script that meets them halfway. A show called Rip Her To Shreds, set in Salem, about girls discovering unruly powers, makes a promise - more hex, clearer rules, and a first act that gets on with it would go a long way towards keeping it.
Rip Her To Shreds runs at Underbelly Cowgate (Iron Belly) until 30 August, 12:35.
★★
Written by Ellora for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
