Wild Thing! – Summerhall

A riotous eco-comedy that shape-shifts into a moving requiem for our planet’s vanishing creatures.

Wild Thing! – Laugh Now, Cry Later!

Summerhall’s TechCube 0 is already a bit of a womb for oddball creativity, and Wild Thing!, the latest creation from Tom Bailey’s Mechanimal, is like an ecological fever dream with a sense of humour. It’s part comedy, part requiem, and part, “what on earth did I just witness?”, in the best possible way.

We enter the performance space together, the audience in single-file, like a school trip with no teacher. Bailey is already mid-flow, becoming a carousel of creatures, some endangered, some right on the edge of existence, some that sound like they’ve escaped from a Monty Python sketch. “Cheerful Pheasant,” “Fearful Owl,” “Polymorphic Rubber Frog,” “Gladiator Lobsterette”… it’s like Attenborough after a bottle of gin. The laughs come easily, until you realise that every one of these daft names is a real species clinging on by its metaphorical fingernails.

That’s the sting in the tail. Because while you’re grinning at a lobster in a toga, the show quietly reminds you that scientists reckon up to 200 species a day are disappearing forever. That’s not “rare Pokémon” numbers, that’s actual extinction, permanent as it gets.

Then the tone begins to slide. Bailey slips on a VR headset and disappears into the ghost of the Bali tiger. The animals become fewer, slower, heavier. Bones are scattered across the stage like dropped truths. He wraps himself in a sheet bearing the names of 48,000 endangered or extinct species, the list so long it feels biblical.

Sound designer Xavier Velastin deserves applause for the way the show’s aural landscape shifts under your feet, from pantomime daftness to sonic gut-punch. And Bailey’s not shy about breaking proximity rules, he’s in the aisles, he’s on the floor, he’s making the loss personal.

One moment lingers: Bailey, crowned with a skull, asks the audience, “What would it mean to be the last of your kind?” He shows a film of his journey from Scotland to Norway, carrying that great species-sheet across wild landscapes like a mourner who refuses to leave the graveside.

Then, just when you think you’re emotionally wrung out, comes the finale. We all become our spirit animal, and for me that means morphing into a Half-Moon Picasso Fish. A bold, striped reef-dweller, gliding with solitary grace, equal parts nightclub bouncer and catwalk model. The lady next to me is a Giant Kangaroo Rat. It’s beautiful, daft, and, given the evening’s themes, tinged with melancholy.

And yes, Mozart’s Requiem pops up again. That’s the third time I’ve heard it this week. It’s starting to feel like there’s a “sad-music-rental” business on the Royal Mile, offering Lacrimosa and a smoke machine at a discount.

Wild Thing! is hilarious, haunting, and structurally clever. It’s a reminder that the gap between laughter and grief is about as wide as a fish’s fin. And in a world where we’re losing life at such a frightening rate, maybe it’s worth spending an hour in a black-box theatre learning how to feel about that.

13:30 Daily (except 12th and 19th) Till 25th August

https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/wild-thing

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 11th August 2025

North West End UK Rating: