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Watch Me Die!

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 3 Published: 19 Aug 2025 theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall Show Dates: 18 Aug 2025-22 Aug 2025

As the blurb on the Edfringe site suggests, you need some pre-drinks to appreciate this one. Watch Me Die! is theatre produced with the attitude of packing a suitcase by stuffing in clothes any old how and jumping on the lid to get it shut.

Entertaining the audience by any means necessary

Written by Jake Smith, the play is a fever dream of a contemporary Wars of the Roses, combined with a bisexual version of Othello where everyone is shagging each other.

The stage is taken by Miles John, playing Benedict Masters, a soldier under the command of Colonel Olivia. However, the acting/narration is supplemented by the Dead Fool Society team with animations, filmed sequences, written text, sound effects and a puppet.

Giving a summary makes it appear more put together than it is. It's a ragbag of jokes – many of them aren’t funny – but the quantity makes up for the quality, so that at least one member of the audience is laughing or squeaking at any one time. (And there are a few good puns thrown in.)

There’s no character depth, no proper structure, no analysis of anything. John, as Masters, and the show as a whole, have the sole aim of grabbing and entertaining the audience by any means necessary. It’s not that the fourth wall is broken, but that there don’t appear to be any walls.

I can’t recommend it as theatre, but if you want a late-night show that is held together by bits of string but is eager to entertain you, then this is worth a punt.

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The Blurb:

Crack out the pre-drinks for Shakespeare after dark. Loud, lawless, and laced with naughty bits, this is rave theatre: performance, film, stand-up and pounding basslines, dragging Shakespeare into a civil war where star-crossed love and vengeance make their scene. Darkly comic and drenched in Northern poetry, it spits in the face of tradition while reclaiming Shakespeare as the king of the nob gag. Accessible, anarchic and unapologetically alive, Watch Me Die! is here to shake up the Fringe. No quills, no corsets – just raw, riotous theatre perfect for thrill seekers. Supported by Junction Goole.