Summerhall, Edinburgh
Audio drama follows the grim decline of an incel, drawing lines between everyday aggression and appalling hate crime
We’re standing with our thoughts on Edinburgh’s Meadows while listening to Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is. It is just the sort of soft-rock number the subject of Marion Thomas’s drama would listen to, with his bland tastes, fancy car and obsession with appearances. He is an involuntary celibate – or incel – a man as lacking in self-awareness as he is filled with hatred for a world he believes has let him down.
The song choice is also ironic. This man does not know what love is, nor is he ever likely to find out. The bleak propaganda of the online communities he frequents will see to that.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August
