Little Animals at Traverse at the Lyceum Studio – Edinburgh Fringe review

If you only know Paul Ready from his TV roles as affable and slightly useless figures in Motherland and Ann Droid, then you might find his Edinburgh Fringe show a shock. Little Animals is an hour-long monologue on a deeply serious theme, and there aren’t many jokes.

It’s a meditation on the impact of climate change, understood through the life of his best friend Richard who, we learn at the start, has recently died by drowning, and there is an unanswered question over whether it was accidental or intentional. Ready tells us about their youth in school, where Richard was the charismatic bad-lad who refused to play by the rules, and then how they remained close in adulthood, even as their paths diverged.

Ready’s character, who is never named, works in finance, while Richard works in conservation and becomes ever more engaged in the climate crisis to an extent that threatens their relationship as they go deeper into adulthood.

If ever there was a time for a message like this then it’s surely now, with the driest summer in 50 years and patches of the UK ablaze due to wildfires. So, this should be fertile ground for the message to land, and much of Ready’s language is powerful.

One problem is that the adult Richard sounds very difficult to like: when Ready’s character gives him his newborn daughter, Richard’s first reaction is “How are we going to protect her?” He’s the kind of character who, on a family walk, meditates on how humanity is being murdered. In Ready’s script, his piece of activism in a Westfields feels like performative attention-seeking rather than a serious effort to change people’s minds.

This speaks to a structural problem in Ready’s text. Some episodes in the hour-long script feel unnecessarily extended – such as the reasons for his love of shopping centres – and the ending is a problem because it just stops in what seems like mid-flow. It felt there was more to unpack that we never found out. It’s at its best when it describes their burgeoning friendship and when it engages with both of their awe at the natural world, but those moments are brief and all in the first half.

It’s staged in the round in the Lyceum Theatre’s studio, with Ready in the midst of the audience. His facial and expressive interactions with the crowd are very strong, and there are no props or sets, so the show relies entirely on him. He’s an engaging presence with whom to spend an hour, and he uses his actorly gifts to let the story unfold naturally: both stars below are for his delivery. However, while his feat is impressive, as an overall experience this left me unmoved.