Failure Project at Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe Review

It’s a brave show that confronts the possibility of its own failure. But Yolanda Mercy who created and performed this semi-comic monologue is prepared to look the consequences of not succeeding straight in the eye – and weigh the cost to her as a performer and a person.

Failure Project is clearly written from the heart, but it is ostensibly the story of Ade, a British Nigerian playwright who is on the cusp of getting her script put on by a major London theatre. The project is personal, based on her experiences as a bullied and shunned scholarship girl at a posh girls’ school. She’s already made numerous compromises: the leading actor has been replaced by an influencer because it will put more bums on seats, the director is taking the script in directions she doesn’t like.

But when it is cancelled after an online furore which is nothing to do with her, it is devastating, triggering all Ade’s insecurities and fears.

The tone is lightly comic and involving, detailing the humiliations of being a struggling playwright – the friend who suggests you don’t really work, the lack of pay, the length of the hours, the sheer grinding battle to get anything staged. But in Ade’s case, the rejection is compounded by daily microaggressions and slights because she is a Black girl in the midst of a white world. When she goes to see a play about slavery, for example, she is asked to move from her seat by an usher and a white couple who can’t believe she has the right to be sitting there.

Gradually the tone turns more serious, culminating in an extraordinary emotional outburst about her sense that she has to succeed not only for herself but for those “who are constantly erased from history, who are shown support without actually being given support, who have to keep going when they want to stop.”

Mercy powerfully suggests that sense of pressure without ever losing her wry wit. At one point, she notes, things have got so bad in terms of her loss of self-esteem that “my parents want me to have therapy before them.”

If the piece is even semi-autobiographical, then it’s hard to credit. Mercy is such an engaging, direct presence with a bold view of the world – and a sense of compassion and empathy that emerges in the final moments when she talks about other artists struggling to make work on the Fringe and gives the audience the opportunity to show them they care.