EDINBURGH 2026: Review: ROCKPOOLS, Bunker Three At Pleasance Courtyard
This haunting one-woman shows revels in oddity
Unless one happens to have read the programme notes beforehand, it’s not immediately obvious that Rockpools is a play about endometriosis. For the first half, the only hint we get is the protagonist’s bloody sheets. Instead, debut writer-performer Molly Windust has created a character rich in oddity, repression and ambiguity, whose problems go far deeper than her illness.
When we meet her, our unnamed protagonist has become part of the rich literary tradition of women in stagnating, sexless marriages who take refuge in their imagination. Stuck in a nightmarish version of domestic bliss, in a home inherited from her husband’s deceased parents, she begins to hoard vintage nautical items from eBay in her in-laws’ old bedroom. The room becomes her sanctuary, and she goes to elaborate lengths to hide it from her husband, like a sexually frustrated (and less murderous) female Bluebeard.
The comparison has become cliche, but there is something Fleabag-esque in Windust’s character’s awkward neuroticism and unabashedly weird sexual tendencies (“there’s something about men when they eat”). Her eccentricity is charming, filling the room with whimsical porcelain sea creatures, until it isn’t, when she covers the room in sand and it slips into decay.
Windust pushes this further still, teasing out how the character’s isolation and obsessive behaviour stems both from her all-consuming university relationship with her now-husband and from a recent endometriosis diagnosis, which has presented the possibility of invasive surgery and fertility issues. Wisely, the writing trusts itself not to spell any of this out too literally until quite late in the game.
Windust is also highly watchable as an actor, playing the protagonist with alternating mania, needing to confess her every thought, and bouts of sheepishness. At the same time, some astute character work from Windust conjures up a full picture of how the protagonist’s husband, himself in the throes of grief, might react to these circumstances, as well as flashbacks depicting his deeply insufferable parents.
What draws the eye perhaps first of all is Windust’s dress, a white shift drenched in dried mud and tufts of colourful moss. It’s a wild, striking contrast to her short, angular hairstyle, and seems to hint at something primal about the character, something that lies dormant within us all, before she’s even spoken a word.
Indeed, nature, and particularly water, is a constant image in the piece. The protagonist is very particular about all the decor in her special room having a seaside theme, and she compares the growths on her ovaries to crabs (the animal, not the STD). The show is punctuated by blasts of an ocean soundscape, seemingly calling the protagonist to some greater sense of meaning, a metaphor she can’t quite place.
This is not a play about endometriosis, nor a play about grief, nor marriage. The protagonist’s behaviour is not straightforwardly a reaction to her isolation, or to her pain, or to not being able to conceive, or to something immutable in her nature. Windust has none of the answers, and so elevates her work above many of her peers writing on similar themes.
Rockpools plays at Bunker Three, Pleasance Courtyard until 30 August
Photo credit: Courtesy of the production
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