Review by Alice
When a performer steps onstage clad in a sparkly jacket, with a keyboard named 'Keyboard' to simulate alien radio frequencies, you naturally brace for low-fi absurdism. You do not expect to leave the theatre clutching a damp tissue, staring quietly at the ceiling. In her wildly inventive solo musical Bean Vs the Robots, writer-performer Midge Lema constructs a fever-dream space odyssey that conceals a soaring, heart-wrenching meditation on maternal loss.
The initial premise leans delightfully hard into the bizarre. Lema plays Bean, a lone astronaut piloting her spaceship 'Spaceship' in...space. Armed with an infectious, quirky theatrical energy, she sings ditties in an almost folk-like way. Lema is a fearless comic force; her physical comedy is sharp, and although her vocal range sounded limited, it was effortless. A microphone would have helped on occasions to hear her over the keyboard but a minor point.
As Bean drifts further into 'space', the absurdity slowly begins to fracture. Her quieter break-out moments gradually reveal her situation to be the terrifying black hole of navigating her pain of the (spoiler) loss of her mother. This isn't a spaceship, and Bean's third rule of 'you can leave, but you can never come back' takes on a completely new meaning. It is the raw, quiet abyss left behind by sudden bereavement. She uses the metaphor of cosmic exile to capture how grief makes the familiar universe feel utterly alien.
The trajectory is a stunningly original triumph. Lema takes the bizarre, isolating vastness of grief and packages it into a show that is as devastating as it is bizarre. It is a profoundly moving reminder that sometimes we have to build a rocket and travel to the end of the universe just to figure out how to say goodbye.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Bean vs The Robots: A Solo Show Musical runs at the Edinburgh Fringe until Saturday 29th August 2026. For tickets, visit https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/bean-vs-the-robots-a-solo-show-musical
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