Fringe review: SUMMER CAMP FOR BROKEN PEOPLE, The REcreate Agency/Grace Dickson Productions - Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Photo credit: Alex Brenner

A bold, brave manifesto about losing your mind, and finding yourself. Emily's life has fallen apart. She thinks her therapist is a dick. She takes Xanax with whisky. She's navigating life as she moves between home, where she's a single mom to her 8-year-old daughter, and her time as a day patient at a psychiatric hospital. But she is trying to piece herself back together. She is taking back control. This autobiographical one-woman show is an empowering memoir about how mental illness infects our lives and what it takes to fix a shattered spirit.

Written by Emily Beecher, this is a sensitive and possibly triggering piece, but it is vitally important that its told and retold and really heard. Performed by Charlie Coletta, Emily is dealing with a lot.... but she thinks she's 'fine'.... until she's not.

It's a story that might resonate with some of us, maybe most of us, and maybe for differing reasons, but that's okay to admit. We don't have to feel shame or embarassment about anything. We're not the ones to blame, we're just the ones who need to try and fix it.

Coletta's performance is just perfect, the right amount of everything. As an audience, we are totally caught up in her life, her emotions, her pain, her frustrations.

It made us smile, it made us cry and it made us feel!

***** Five stars

Reviewed by: Rachel Louise Martin

Summer Camp for Broken People plays in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall at 1.30pm until 27 August.