EDINBURGH 2025: Review: RED LIKE FRUIT, Traverse Theatre

Red Like Fruit is a two-hander exploring questions around consent and the suppression of women’s voices in sexual abuse claims. The staging is minimal: Lauren (Michelle Montieth) sits on a chair on a raised platform, while Luke (David Patrick Flemming) stands at a lectern on a lower level beside her, reading her story aloud. For almost the entire 70-minute performance, he speaks as her - his voice carrying her words, memories, and pain. Lauren only occasionally interjects, sparking brief moments of dialogue. But for the most part, she sits silently, gazing out at the audience as her narrative is projected through him.

Written by Hannah Moscovitch - who won a Fringe First award for this play - Red Like Fruit dives into Lauren’s harrowing journey. At first, she recounts covering a high-profile domestic abuse case. However the story devastatingly turns inward, capturing her own memory of being sexually abused as a teenager by an older cousin.

The effect is both chilling and impactful. The play interrogates how women’s stories are so often mediated, reshaped, or validated through male voices - a point made explicit when Lauren admits she believes her account will sound “more believable” coming from a man.

It is an undeniably powerful piece, taut with tension and carried by two strong performances. Flemming gives Lauren’s words urgency and weight, while Montieth’s stillness brims with a quiet fury. The imbalance of silence and speech, presence and absence, becomes its own form of commentary.

At times the format feels a little repetitive, losing the power of the piece a little. The minimal movement did at times feel more like a staged reading than a fully developed piece of theatre. Nevertheless the piece ​​unsettles, demands reflection, and leaves an audience grappling with how stories of abuse are told... and who gets to tell them.

Red Like Fruit was at the Traverse Theatre until 24 August.

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