One of the hottest tickets on the Fringe, maybe the hottest, from the producers that brought you Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. Sold out for most of the run before the Fringe even started, but if you are willing to hang around the ticket booth at exactly two hours before showtime you might just be lucky enough to snag the odd seat. This one’s going to tour, and it deserves to.
The Bengsons, husband and wife, Shaun and Abigail, call Ohio an “ecstatic grief concert,” which sounds like something dreamed up by a marketing intern on too much kombucha. But within about thirty seconds you realise they mean it, every word. This is part gig, part confession, part secular revival meeting, and part science lecture for people who didn’t know they wanted to learn about the inner ear.
Shaun Bengson, bespectacled and warm, has progressive hearing loss and tinnitus. Rather than brushing over it, the duo leans right in. Using the venue’s sound system like a surgical instrument, they literally build the sound of tinnitus in the room, layer by layer, from the faint cicada whine to the full industrial roar. It’s the sort of thing you’d normally only experience if you’d been very unlucky with your stereo volume knob or your life choices at a Motörhead gig. Alongside this, they give a crash course in how stereocilia, the tiny hair cells in the cochlea, can be damaged, leaving your brain to “fill in the gaps” with phantom noise. It’s science, it’s art, and it’s genuinely extraordinary to sit inside.
Musically, they’re an interesting and complex machine: Abigail all urgent energy and loose-limbed gestures, Shaun more grounded, taken together, their harmonies lock like precision joinery. Their songs are the kind that start simply and then open up, almost imperceptibly, into something transcendent. Think indie-folk hymns with a side order of righteous fury.
And then there’s the theology. Shaun’s father was a pastor who also carries the gene for degenerative hearing loss, and in the middle of his own troubles one day stood up and told his congregation that heaven isn’t a post-mortem gated community, but here, now, in the messy mortal coil we all shuffle around in. The church sacked him on the spot for his trouble, because that’s not quite keeping to the approved script. It’s a moment in the show that lands with a thud in the chest. You can see how this blend of defiance and love runs deep in the family.
The staging at Assembly Roxy is deliberately spare: just the two of them, a few instruments, a projector, and creative captions that are not just access add-ons but part of the show’s visual rhythm. The acoustics in the old hall lend their harmonies an unearned halo, the room becomes the third voice.
There’s a deep generosity to Ohio. It’s not a misery memoir, despite circling grief, deafness, and death. Instead, it’s an invitation to find joy in the mess, to share the weight so no one has to carry it alone. The audience leaves smiling, some with tears still wet, others buzzing from the unexpected blend of biology, balladry, and big-hearted belief.
It’s rare to walk out of a Fringe show feeling like you’ve been at once educated, serenaded, and quietly radicalised. But that’s Ohio, a hymn to hearing, to loss, and to living as if heaven might just be right here, because maybe it is
15:00 Daily (except 11th and 18th ) Till 24th August
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/ohio
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 12th August 2025
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 15mins
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