EDINBURGH 2026: Review: SLAYERS, Assembly
Slayers runs at Edfringe until 30 August
Slayers is a blistering new drama written by Corrine Salisbury and directed by Jo Rush.
Zoe Hunter is our lone performer in this one-woman play and she certainly knows how to command a room. She plays Liane, a single mother to a ten-year-old girl, Molly.
Liane is walking through the Meadows one day and a man approaches her. He insists on having an interaction with her, which she tries to shut down while remaining polite. The conversation makes her uneasy but its nothing you could really report- just a bit weird. When leaving, he holds her wrist and touches her pulse point, which makes her deeply uncomfortable and the encounter plays on her mind for days.
Molly is having some trouble at school with boys in her year who are bullying her. Liane decides to get in touch with her brother’s ex-girlfriend Natalie who they always liked and who owns a boxing gym in order to teach them some moves as a way to release some of their frustrations. Molly thrives under Natalie’s guidance and her newfound skills give her so much confidence.
Liane starts to investigate some online forums and discovers that the man who tries to intimidate her does it frequently to young women and other men egg him on. She delves into the manosphere and is horrified by the things she reads. The anger spurs her on and after honing some skills in the gym, her and some other women form a vigilante group to stand up for women.
What is really interesting in the writing is that even though these men are behaving abhorrently, Liane can’t seem to rid herself of empathy. She thinks about how loved these men would have been as infants, how precious and she wonders what their mothers would think of how they behave now. Slayers is a story about fighting back but its also emotionally vulnerable.
Zoe Hunter is just exceptional as Liane. Her rage at the way she has been treated, how these men are talking online and how the boys in her daughter’s class are behaving is contagious. The language used is unsettling but necessary to convey just how murky things get in these forums.
Slayers is an electrifying piece of new writing with a powerhouse performance from Hunter.
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