THERMODRAMA to Open at Edinburgh Fringe
Written by Coco Cottam and directed by Lydia Free, the show plays Summerhall's Old Lab.
Thermodrama will come to Edinburgh Fringe. Performances will run at Summerhall (Old Lab), 1 Summerhall, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL Thursday 7 th- Monday 31st August 2026 (not 18th, 25th), 22:30.
Following a sell-out run last summer in Edinburgh, Lovelock Productions (BLANDY) return to the Old Lab with their new show Thermodrama, set to sizzle audiences this summer. Taking their significant stylistic approach, the work engages with “wellness culture”, the self-care obsession that has become increasingly pervasive. It positions this as a kind of self-care apocalypse and brings it inside the blazing belly of the beast.
Written by Coco Cottam and directed by Lydia Free, the show follows a group of strangers trapped in a sauna where the temperature steadily rises until they begin to boil. Set entirely within this enclosed space, the play begins with the reunion of two estranged sisters: Soph, who has not slept in weeks, and Jen, who may have just hit someone with her car. Their fragile reunion is disrupted by Pete, an evangelical gym enthusiast, and further destabilised by the arrival of Shane, the cyclist Jen may have hit, who comes seeking revenge. The cast features Izzy Lever (Roots, Playhouse East; Plus One, Upstairs at the Gatehouse), Camilla Anvar (Death on the Nile, UK and Ireland Tour; The Moisnee Project, New Diorama Theatre), Luke Nixon (Twelfth Night; BLANDY with Lovelock Productions) and Matty Loane (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, West End; Committed, Fable Productions & Cameron Productions).
Thermodrama embraces a deliberately messy aesthetic, created through a process of improvisation and extended character development in direct dialogue with itself. It interrogates self-improvement culture from the perspective of those most vulnerable to it, not the uber-wealthy tech-bro biohackers, but ordinary people navigating precarious lives. It considers what the dream of health becomes when it is sold to those who most want to change their lives.
Coco Cottam, writer, comments, I wanted to write a play that confronts the contemporary obsession with ‘living to live’ or living to extend life. Online wellness culture sells a dream of self-optimisation and control. The sauna felt like the perfect place to set an interrogation of this journey. Four people sit in a hot room, waiting to improve. But what happens if, after all that, no one gets better? What if everyone gets worse?
With the sauna spilling across the venue this summer, it becomes an example of wellness obsession infiltrating artistic spaces as an anti-wellness intervention. An unmissable exploration of the present moment, interrogating the obsession with “living to live” or extending life at any cost, and how this can become quietly insidious.
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