There are moments in Coffee with Sugar at the Traverse Theatre when the senses are so thoroughly engaged that conventional critical distance simply gives way. Smell, sound, movement and image collide in ways that feel genuinely intoxicating, even overwhelming, in a production that prioritises sensory immersion over narrative drive.
The show forms part of the Manipulate Festival, one of the many festivals Edinburgh hosts throughout the year, and arguably one of the most consistently rewarding. Dedicated to visual theatre, puppetry and experimental performance, Manipulate reliably delivers work that foregrounds audio visual invention and formal risk taking, and Coffee with Sugar unquestionably lives up to that billing.
The piece is led by Laia Ribera Cañénguez, who also created the work. Drawing directly on her own background, a Spanish father and a mother from El Salvador, Ribera Cañénguez frames herself as a “mixture”, much like coffee with sugar. It is a bleakly delivered metaphor, suggesting identity as something blended by history rather than freely chosen, and it sits at the conceptual heart of the piece.
Played on the stage in front of Traverse One’s steep rake, the production makes strong use of space. Live music by Cuban musician Yahima Piedra Córdova underpins much of the action, shifting between pulsing electronic rhythms and more reflective piano synth textures. The audio visual design is often striking, and at its best genuinely memorable.
One image lingers long after the lights fade, Ribera Cañénguez coating her head in spun sugar, transforming herself into a grotesque candyfloss figure while the music churns beneath her. It is absurd, unsettling and effective, a potent visual shorthand for sugar as pleasure, addiction and slow violence. Sugar, she argues, is something we crave despite knowing it harms us, a substance deeply embedded in Western life and Western death.
Coffee is treated more ambiguously, both as material and metaphor. Beans are poured onto a large swinging platform at centre stage, scattering into precise circular patterns, a hypnotic moment suggesting systems, cycles and industrial scale. The smell of coffee permeates the space, beans crushed underfoot as the performer moves, ensuring the audience remains physically aware of what is being discussed. At one point, spectators are invited forward to drink freshly brewed coffee, collapsing the distance between consumption and critique.
The political strand focuses on Guatemala and the lasting impact of German migration and land acquisition following the First World War, a history that reshaped plantation ownership and economic power in one of the world’s major coffee producing countries. These passages are informative, but they are also where the piece begins to feel uneven. The pacing becomes tentative, the structure patchy, and the performance lacks the urgency needed to carry its argument forward with sustained momentum.
More broadly, the storytelling itself struggles to fully compel. Sugar is presented almost exclusively as poison, while coffee is framed largely as a colonial commodity and symbol of exploitation. What is missing is any serious engagement with coffee’s extraordinary chemical complexity and its more ambiguous effects, the thousands of compounds it contains, its antioxidant properties, and its documented benefits for mood, activity levels and cardiovascular health. Exploring coffee as both exploitative and life enhancing might have complicated the work in productive ways rather than narrowing its focus.
That said, Coffee with Sugar is not a lecture, and it is most successful when it allows image, sound and smell to do the intellectual work. Ribera Cañénguez is a compelling stage presence, and Piedra Córdova’s live music provides much of the piece’s emotional propulsion. Even when the argument falters, the sensory experience remains absorbing.
You may leave wishing the ideas had been driven harder and shaped more rigorously. But you are unlikely to leave untouched, coffee in your nose, sugar on your tongue, and an uneasy awareness of how pleasure, history and power remain tightly, and uncomfortably, mixed
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 4th February 2026
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr