Paul Ready is a familiar face to television audiences, notably as the wonderfully beleaguered Kevin in Motherland and the considerably more sinister Lee in Utopia, alongside an extensive stage career including work at the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe. Perhaps those credentials are part of the draw behind the sell-out interest in Little Animals. The question is what happens when Ready strips almost everything away and stands alone in a room with a story to tell.
Conceived, written and performed by Ready, and directed by Caroline Steinbeis, Little Animals is ostensibly about his best friend Richard. Ready tells us almost immediately that Richard is dead. He is no longer here. Dead. From that stark beginning, he starts piecing together the life of his friend and, more importantly, the relationship between two men who grew up together but increasingly grew into very different adults.
That difference becomes the engine of the piece. Richard’s growing relationship with nature and the environment sits against Ready’s rather different outlook. Their friendship survives disagreements, changing priorities and the frustrations that come from knowing someone for so long that affection and irritation become almost inseparable.
And then there are the effing tomatoes.
Something so apparently trivial becomes wonderfully representative of their differences. Ready can make us laugh at Richard’s preoccupations while simultaneously allowing us to understand why they mattered to him. It is in these smaller memories that Little Animals works best. Richard gradually emerges not as some idealised dead friend, but as an awkward, passionate and sometimes infuriating human being.
The room itself reinforces that sense of something deliberately untheatrical. Within a large, bare rectangular hall, with something of a sports hall feel about it, the audience is arranged octagonally around the performance space, just two rows deep. Above is a high vaulted, exposed trussed roof punctuated by roof lights, with natural daylight doing much of the work and only the slightest intervention from artificial lighting. There is no set to speak of and nowhere for Ready to disappear. At times, with this little circle of people gathered around one man standing up to talk about his life and his friend, it feels less like a theatrical performance and more like we’ve inadvertently wandered into an AA meeting.
Ready is terrific at this. Warm, personable and apparently effortless, he moves between humour, exasperation, affection, grief and the wider anxieties that increasingly occupied Richard. There is virtually no theatrical camouflage here, and Ready doesn’t need it.
My reservation lies with the premise surrounding that storytelling. Ready insists this isn’t really theatre. He has hired a room and gathered us together to talk about Richard. But we didn’t know Richard, so why are we here? Ready also reveals that he wasn’t allowed to attend his best friend’s funeral, without ever completely explaining why. We might infer that some around Richard held Ready responsible for what happened.
That makes the eulogy sitting somewhere beneath Little Animals all the more tantalising. Had this been the funeral Ready was denied, or his attempt to recreate it, the room would immediately acquire an internal logic. We might be Richard’s friends and family, gathered not only to remember him but perhaps to demand answers.
Yet that is one structural reservation within a piece containing much to admire. At its heart is a beautifully observed portrait of male friendship, of two people capable of loving one another while seeing the world increasingly differently, and ultimately of what remains when one of them is gone.
Ready can unquestionably carry a room alone, but Little Animals does not quite convince me why I was invited into it.
Playing until August 30th 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026LITTLEA
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 19th August 2026
North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 10mins