To Watch a Man Eat at Shakespeare North Playhouse

This summer our friends at Shakespeare North Playhouse are hosting the Heading North Fringe Festival, a new two-week-long theatre festival showcasing some of the immense talent heading up to Edinburgh Fringe in August. The hand-picked performance programme spans drama, physical theatre, drag, stand-up and more – and one production by prize-winning new writer Sadie Pearson caught our eye.

Full Frontal Theatre will perform their Edinburgh Fringe preview of To Watch a Man Eat as part of the Heading North Fringe Festival. Penned by Alpine Fellowship-awarded writer Sadie Pearson, To Watch a Man Eat is a play all about appetite and the extremes we are willing to reach to build the lives we crave. Offering a blistering commentary on class, sex and relationships, three characters tackle control and morality head-on.

Andrew, Melissa and Micky are a triptych of desire. Two blokes – choked by their respective white and blue collars – and one woman who is hungry for it all. But in a top-heavy world, balanced by excess at the top and slim pickings at the bottom – who ends up truly starved?

Running at 60 minutes long, To Watch a Man Eat is a wonderfully uncomfortable watch – and this is its appeal. Billed as “sexy, perverted, a little bit twisted”, this show is the best kind of in-yer-face theatre – never shying away from the shocking, gruesome and provocative.

The show was well-received when it premiered to sell-out audiences earlier this year in Bristol. Described as a “brilliant exploration of the female psyche” (TWSS Magazine) with “deliciously dark writing” (Backstage Bristol), To Watch a Man Eat is up there as one of our hot picks for Edinburgh Fringe 2024, and the perfect opportunity to catch a gripping show from the next generation of young, daring and unapologetic theatre-makers.