Safety, the debut production from new Scottish theatre company Light Mends Carefully, is a darkly comic and quietly unnerving solo play about care, control and the stories we choose to believe. Written by Michael Reid, it follows Adam, a psychotherapist whose concern for a former client, Bill , draws him back into a relationship that should have remained firmly in the past. What begins as professional compassion gradually curdles into something far more complicated, as boundaries blur and power shifts in ways both subtle and alarming.
Reid’s premise is immediately gripping because it resists easy moral certainty. Adam is not presented as a simple villain, nor as an uncomplicated victim of circumstance. Instead, Safety asks the audience to sit inside his version of events and notice, almost in real time, how persuasive self-justification can become. The consulting room, usually imagined as a space of trust and repair, becomes charged with ambiguity: who gets listened to, who gets labelled, and who has the authority to turn private pain into an official narrative?
The play’s queer lens gives this tension particular force. Adam’s watchfulness is rooted in a lifetime of reading rooms for danger, a survival instinct that has become both professional skill and personal flaw. Reid also gestures towards psychiatry’s fraught history with queer lives, allowing the piece to examine not only one therapist’s choices, but the wider systems of care that can protect, diagnose, dismiss or harm. That broader context gives the drama a sharp political edge without turning it into a lecture.
As a solo work, Safety depends on precision: the gradual reveal, the careful withholding of certainty, the tiny shifts in tone that ask the audience question what they have accepted. Its strength lies in that discomfort. The humour is dark rather than broad, emerging from Adam’s attempts to sound reasonable even as the ground beneath him becomes less secure. There is an accuracy to the writing that suggests Reid understands the emotional charge of therapeutic relationships as well as their ethical fragility.
Staging and a subtle underscore by Dominic Brennan, superb direction by Chloe Champken complete this excellent insight into the realm of psychotherapeutic dilemma.
The result is a thoughtful and unsettling piece that lingers because it refuses to tell us exactly what to think. A solo piece often fails hold attention, not Safety. With Reid’s use of position on the stage and a change in character it delivers. The final decision of the main character pulls the air from our lungs to the blackout. This is a very promising start for Light mends Carefully and one to see at the fringe and in the future.
Running until the 30th August (except 18th/25th) at 11.45pm. Come along to Daisy at Underbelly, Bristo Square.
Tickets available at www.edfringe.com
Reviewer: Ross Mackie
Reviewed: 10th August 2026
North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: