Playbill Picks Review: Is the WiFi in Hell Good? Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Theatre flyers at the Fringe

Playbill Picks Review: Is the WiFi in Hell Okay? Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Lyndon Chapman has written and stars in a shocking new play about queer life on the margins.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival with over 3,700 shows, and this year Playbill is coming to Edinburgh for the festival and will be taking you there. follow me It covers all aspects of the fringe, our real lives. Brigadoon!

As part of our coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe, Playbill will be seeing and sharing our thoughts on lots of shows. Use these reviews as a friendly, opinionated guide when choosing shows for the festival.

Living by the British seaside seems like a dream come true, but not for Dev. Growing up in Margate in the 1990s, he felt like he was the only gay person in the world and his chances were slim. A dilapidated amusement park shadows the coastline, a dark reminder that Margate’s prosperity and joy are long gone.

That’s the general structure of Lyndon Chapman’s unusual, vivid and brilliant new one-man play. Is the WiFi in Hell Good?currently playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and starring Chapman himself, is a sometimes savagely funny, other times utterly subversive, tale of an outsider searching for a community that doesn’t accept him.

In Margate, Dev is surrounded by one loyal friend and a lot of bigots (the title comes from a witty retort Dev hurls at homophobic bullies who tell him he’s going to hell). He eventually moves to London for university and finds other gay men, but ultimately finds it’s not a community where he feels he belongs. To make matters worse, by the time Dev retreats to Margate, the town has gentrified into an upmarket weekend getaway destination, relegating Dev even further to the margins.

And just as Dev is at his lowest point, closest to breaking point, he is pursued by a monster covered in horrible black seaweed. What is this mysterious creature? Why does it keep appearing? What is its purpose, and where does it intend to lead our tragic hero?

Chapman’s writing and performance, and Will Armstrong’s deft direction, are witty, sharp and surprisingly authentic: Dev is no whiner, but a loveable, aching misfit. Is the WiFi in Hell Okay? The play explores how the experiences of growing up on the fringes can stick with you or stick with you, leaving you there in loneliness for years to come. Insightful yet shocking, the story follows the protagonist as he makes his way through a world that seems designed to crush him. But where it gets truly emotional is when the play delves into how trauma can make a person their own worst enemy, further perpetuating their own loneliness. How can one process and cope with their pain when the world is throwing new pieces at them on a daily basis?

Sadly, it’s no coincidence that Chapman made his protagonist queer; I immediately and overwhelmingly related to the work. In one scene, Dev talks about the five voices we can code-switch, adjusting our outward personas to improve our chances of acceptance and safety — a survival strategy many queer people are familiar with. But Chapman takes it a step further, exploring how that tortured existence makes it hard to understand who we are behind all the layers of artifice, and what it means when the community you belong to never knows who you really are.

This is part of how Chapman wisely made the play and characters so specific. I didn’t know much about Margate before seeing the play, and there were some references and punchlines that Americans might not get. But that same specificity is what makes Dev and his achingly sad story so recognizable. Chapman and Armstrong have crafted a story that makes you want to embrace the main character. It also makes me think about parts of my own life that haven’t been fully processed, and occasionally gives birth to my own seaweed monsters.

I don’t want to spoil the touching ending, but Is the WiFi in Hell Good?? isn’t all sad. The play ultimately reminds us that to face our most terrifying demons, we need to reach out directly, not look away or run away. In his opening remarks after the performance I saw, Chapman said performing the play had been cathartic. I was happy to hear that, because the audience’s experience was cathartic as well.

Is the WiFi in Hell Okay? The show is playing at Iron Belly, Underbelly Cowgate until August 25th. Tickets are available at herePlease see the photo below.

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Photos: Is the WiFi in Hell Good? Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024