Character Flaw
Rating: ★★★★
Venue: Underbelly Bristo Square, Edinburgh 

Colourful explosions pop in this hilarious exploration of ADHD and queer identity. A plethora of eye-opening topics and hysterical anecdotes leave the audience educated, moved and highly entertained. Follow Pip as she navigates the challenges and celebrates the joys of neurodiversity.

Character Flaw is a wholesome and heart wrenching exploration of one woman’s experience of living with ADHD, and what better way to demonstrate ADHD than putting on a show as chaotic as our brains? Philippa Dawson, or Pip, has never truly fit in, and it wasn’t until getting their ADHD diagnosis in adulthood that the pieces started falling into place. It’s becoming quite a common and tired narrative, especially for girls and those assigned female at birth, as waiting lists get longer and a rapidly growing number of children are overlooked and left undiagnosed to struggle well into adulthood.

Pip has titled their show after an oh so flattering comment they would regularly receive from medical professionals, with the intention of enforcing to all neurodivergent individuals that there is absolutely nothing ‘wrong’ with us, while at the same time cleverly acting as a reminder that absolutely everyone has flaws and that doesn’t make you a bad person either. And she does all this before the show has even started!

The show was mostly made up of some deep, heartfelt stories and impassioned speeches couched between funny anecdotes purposefully patchworked together in a clumsy mismatched way, making for not only a pretty accurate example of how an ADHD brain often works, but also takes the audience on an emotional rollercoaster that authentically reflects how having ADHD can affect how we process emotions (I often go through the entire spectrum at least twice on an hourly basis), and creating a way for the audience to experience something for themselves is an innovative way of demonstrating an experience to people who will never understand.

Pip begins the show by running in flustered and late and proceeds to empty bags of seemingly random items and litter them around the stage, something she later quips resembles the inside of their head much of the time. This was a simple but very effective way of beginning the show, Pip cleverly made herself and her story totally relatable and with that I was hooked immediately and she held me the entire way through. 

As it happens, the performance I attended was entirely sold out and the rest of Pip’s run has been much the same; but regardless it felt like they were talking to me directly, as if she’d taken my hand and brought me along on this journey with her. The script manages to remain extremely personal, while also universally relatable for both those neurodivergent and neurotypical but in quite different ways.

You can book tickets to see Character Flaw, here.

Review by Rachel