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Cult Following

 
Nicholas Abrams Review by Nicholas Abrams 3 Published: 5 Jul 2026 50 Tank House Ln Show Dates: 6 Jul 2026-11 Jul 2026

Sometimes the best Fringe experiences are the ones you never planned to have. I found myself with an unexpected gap in my schedule, noticed Cult Following was about to begin, and wandered in knowing almost nothing about it. Sixty minutes later, I walked out still trying to work out exactly what I’d seen.

Baffling, ambitious, but never boring

That isn’t necessarily a criticism.

Jane Adé’s ambitious new play begins in relatively familiar territory. Eve is isolated in her apartment, spending her days interacting with her AI companion, Machina, while drifting further away from the real world. After losing her job, she impulsively signs up for a wellness retreat in Hawaii run by a social media influencer. So far, so plausible. It’s once Eve arrives and surrenders her technology that the production takes a sharp turn into increasingly surreal territory.

The retreat is, unsurprisingly, a cult. Its members range from the utterly devoted to the reluctantly recruited, but rather than settling into a conventional thriller, the play continues to spiral into stranger and stranger places. By the final scenes, Eve is fleeing the compound, meeting the influencer herself, and giving birth to a half-human, half-robot child conceived earlier through her relationship with Machina. If that sounds bewildering on the page, it feels little less bewildering in performance.

Yet the remarkable thing is that I never found myself bored. Quite the opposite. The play continually wrong-foots the audience, refusing to follow the narrative path you expect. There are clearly ideas here about artificial intelligence, parasocial relationships, influencer culture and our desire to outsource human connection. Whether those ideas fully coalesce into a satisfying whole is another matter. The play asks plenty of fascinating questions but seems less interested in answering them.

Jane Adé also delivers an engaging central performance. Eve remains sympathetic even as the world around her becomes increasingly surreal, giving the audience someone to hold on to amid the chaos. Malak Zeineddine makes an effectively unsettling high-ranking cult member, although the character itself feels written more as a symbol than a fully rounded person.

As the lights came up, I realised I still wasn’t entirely sure what Cult Following had been trying to say. But I had enjoyed the journey. It may not tie its ideas together as neatly as it could, but it is imaginative, unpredictable and never short of confidence. In a festival where originality is often promised but not always delivered, that counts for quite a lot.

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The Blurb:

A creation re-telling for the digital age told through the voice of an all female cast and crew. Think 'Her' meets 'Midsommar’' and 'Titane'. After falling in love with an Al, a lonely woman joins an off-grid wellness retreat to rediscover human connection. However, the group's unsettling rituals begin to strip her of her identity and she questions whether she's healing or needs to escape a cult.