Thermodrama at Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe review

As soon as I got my ticket for Thermodrama, I realised I’d made a small mistake. A play, set in a sauna, running at Summerhall – the very venue that will be hosting the brand new Sauna Theatre? I’d assumed this was a Sauna Theatre show. Rather than theatre set in a sauna.

Coco Cottam’s new four-hander follows a quartet of individuals – mostly strangers to one another – who converge in a public sauna, and their lives ping off each other like charged electrons. It’s spiky, at times abstract, and deftly written.

Maybe they’d originally hoped it would have run at the Sauna Theatre? Maybe it was programmed for the Sauna Theatre and then moved? What’s funny is, the Old Lab at Summerhall is all of about three metres from the Sauna Theatre. The cast could exit from an on-stage sauna and enter a real sauna.

We have two sisters – Soph and Jen, axiomatically different yet pulled together in spite of themselves, as well as gym-obsessed Pete, devoted to the temple of self-improvement through a religiously maintained physical regime. Finally there’s Shane, who has just been hit by a car. Amongst this slightly unexpected quartet, Cottam gradually, achingly, teases out stakes and witty insights – into ideas of self-improvement, connection and identity. There’s a surprising amount swirling around the hot mist.

I wonder if the show could transfer to the Sauna Theatre? It doesn’t move away from that single room and could lend a bit of authenticity. If it was all a strange programming coincidence, it’d be a big one. I digress.

Lydia Free’s direction is fairly loose, and at times the show feels awkwardly ungainly – characters having to shimmy around Carmen Neat’s set. Momentum never really gets a chance to build until the final ten minutes or so. The biggest fault seems to be a lack of ambition – Cottam’s characters certainly feel well-drawn, watchable and three-dimensional, but there never seems to be that killer moment. That said – all have done strong work in making themselves ones to watch going forwards.

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