‘I feel a rising anxiety ...’ My odyssey through Edinburgh’s intense, unsettling one-to-one shows

I’m standing on an Edinburgh street corner waiting for my next show but things feel a little different: I’m in a queue of just one. However, this has not been a terrible day for ticket sales – it is entirely deliberate. The play I’m about to see, You’re Needy (Sounds Frustrating), sells a single seat for each performance and the production is built specifically for one audience member. The team behind it, tasteinyourmouth, are not alone in their endeavours at the fringe, which has long presented shows designed for solitary viewers.

A young woman approaches, introducing herself as “Carrie’s sister”, and leads me up many flights of stairs to a flat. “She’s ready for you,” she tells me, and opens the door of the bathroom, encouraging me to take the lone seat next to the tub to meet the wellness obsessed Carrie (a part played by the show’s co-founder, Laoise Murray).

You’re Needy (Sounds Frustrating) is about the pull of the health industry and the effect it can have on women’s minds and bodies. Carrie lies in the bath, which is brimful of hot water, wrapped up like a mummy in clingfilm and seaweed. She has cucumber circles to cover her eyes and a cleansing mask glued to her skin. She’s on a “journey to purification” and I’m there to help her re-engage with the outside world. It’s an intense experience. The bathroom is small and Carrie needs me to pass her various props, including cameras to take pictures of her body, a meal of diet noodles, and vitamins to snort.

Why decide to create this piece for just one person? “When you’re in such a small space in such an intimate setting, pretty much every aspect is under a microscope,” says the director and co-founder of tasteinyourmouth, Grace Morgan. “The audience can’t sit back too much and just receive everything passively.” It’s true – I’m so aware of being the only other person in the room that I’m on high alert.

“Different audience members can change the piece, in terms of how willing they are, or how comfortable they feel,” Morgan says. During the show, I’m asked a series of personal questions about my own relationship with my body. But, while I’m encouraged to give honest answers, my responses won’t change what has been systematically curated by the creative team. There is still a script, with key lighting changes and a distinct narrative structure. The ticket holder, for the most part, takes the role of observer.

Elsewhere, Lien – a dance piece by Australian choreographer Lewis Major – relies totally on the responses of the single audience member in the moment. Watching Lien will be a different experience for everyone. Created as an “antidote to the distancing of Covid times” and first performed during the era of social distancing, it begins as a conversation between a dancer and the audience member. The dancer, Clementine Benson, and I sit on stage, six metres apart but facing each other, and I’m asked to describe, among other things, a place I feel safe, a memory I would like to repeat and when I last felt listened to. It is an exposing and slightly unsettling exchange to have with a stranger, but my answers inspire an improvised dance routine that is beautiful to watch.

“People were really touched by it,” says Major about the show’s first run in Australia. But, with the success of Lien totally reliant on the audience member being willing to open themselves up, how does he ensure that happens? “We try to create an environment where it doesn’t really matter that the person you’re talking to is a stranger … and it’s not necessarily about spilling your deepest, darkest secrets, but about creating connection in the moment,” he says.

As I ease into the dialogue with Benson, I feel myself more inclined to divulge. There’s a distinct spontaneity to Lien: unless the audience member has already seen the show, they will not know what to expect and will not have answers prepared. How do they rehearse? “Well, yeah, you don’t really!” says Major, who makes sure each dancer gets the opportunity to do at least one run with someone outside their immediate team before performing to the public. “But it is not about making it perfect, it is about building authenticity.”

Being the solo audience member is one thing, but being the only person in the whole room is something else. That’s the scenario for Temping, created by the New York-based theatre companies Wolf359 and Dutch Kills Theater. Finding myself in a startlingly realistic office set, I’m here to work as a temp at an insurance company, covering for an actuary. She has left me instructions to follow, a phone that rings and an inbox full of emails waiting for replies. Depending on how efficient you are, the performance can range from 30 minutes to more than an hour.

Asa Wember, the show’s designer, believes that giving an audience member “a hand in guiding the show” is key to the success of a one-person performance. “You have to sort of walk a tightrope between delivering a scripted show and being flexible to an audience member.” As I await instructions to fill in Excel spreadsheets and check statistics, I feel a rising anxiety, similar to actually starting a new job: I really don’t want to mess up. “The show comes to you via the means of communication that are present in an office. So emails, faxes, phone messages,” says Wember.

The original idea for Temping came to Wember and the rest of the team 10 years ago: “We were thinking about the core mechanism of theatre, that you’re in the room with another live person or people … we wanted to see what theatre would look like if we removed that component.”

What is left is a play that challenges the definition of audience and performer. In theory, I have as much agency to affect the show’s trajectory as the creators – I later find out that there is a team, backstage, churning out personal responses to the emails I write. Wember wants audiences to feel in control of their own destiny, but the freedom he has given them has been somewhat troublesome too. “Some people have come in and not wanted to cooperate,” he says. Others refuse to respond to emails or download unrelated material from the internet. “Maybe, it’s because they think they’re by themselves,” he thinks.

Temping, You’re Needy and Lien are running more than four shows a day. But, even if they sell out all performances, they can’t be financially lucrative – and the Edinburgh fringe is hardly a place to make money. So how do the finances work? “We were never in it for the money, but, yeah obviously it’s not exactly a big box-office spinner,” says William Dunleavy, the third co-founder of tasteinyourmouth. This show has been supported by Culture Ireland. “We couldn’t do it without their support … no one’s buying a house out of this one. No one’s even buying a Mars bar!”

Some save money on the venue. “All we need is a bathroom,” says Morgan, and so in Edinburgh, they just use the one in the house their company is renting. “We’re doing the full Andy Warhol: we live there, we perform there, we party there,” she says. “It just made financial sense.” Major tends to view Lien as a companion piece to his other shows. His production Triptych is also being performed at Edinburgh’s Dance Base venue, where Lien is staged. “It works really well with other work we’re touring because we can use the same theatre … we can use it in the day or in the time before a show,” he says.

It is rare that you feel so essential as an audience member, but in all the performances I attend, I have a sense that I could actually sway the show’s path. If I stop complying, the narrative shifts. Passive viewing is not an option. A one-person show seems in part an experiment that digs into the heart of connection and human responses. And these are rare fringe performances that are practically guaranteed a full house.

• You’re Needy (Sounds Frustrating) is at Buccleuch Terrace until 26 August. Lewis Major: Lien is at Assembly @ Dance Base until 25 August. Temping is at Assembly George Square Studios until 26 August.