Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Lara Ciulli, one half of The Sisters Fig and a Chortle best newcomer nominee this year, has now teamed with a new partner Rianna White for a fresh project, Those People, a fascinating and immensely impressive show that feels like an intense queer love story glazed with a thin veneer of sketch comedy.

Ciulli and White’s show is not narrative sketch – almost all of the segments are themed around love, or at least lust, but there is no continuity between bits, and the performers adeptly shift poles, so that desire flows in both directions depending on the characters they’re inhabiting. 

It opens with – of all things – a technically superb mime of a couple accidentally driving their car into a lake, with one having to rescue and resuscitate the other; Ciulli brilliant as an unconscious person trapped by their seatbelt in a sinking wreck. 

Shortly afterwards we’re in a studio flat as an inexperienced girl is manhandled out of her clothes by a clumsy lover on a hardwood floor (again, beautifully observed), and then a chopped version of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

As sketches and scenarios and comedic modes fluidly shift into one another, the through-line remains of two people underneath the comedy, investigating their feelings for one another through this kaleidoscope of memory, impressions and imaginings.

Ciulli and White are in perfect sync throughout; you can tell they’re drawing from a deep well of common influences, both comedically and in other areas. Interestingly, the show features a lot of very well-choreographed modern dance, sometimes for comedic purposes, sometimes for tone-setting, and sometimes when the undercurrents of feeling become too much and can only be expressed through movement. 

That biting point between love, sex, and platonic friendship is the spine of the experience – as verbalised a little towards the end, Those People is about how queer friendships, especially as a young person, can sometimes take place on shifting sands where you’re not sure if you want to sleep with someone, transform yourself into their mirror image, or just spend all your time hanging out with them.

As the show progresses, a kind of constellation of relationships is drawn. After those awkward early years, the duo are eventually able to find a true first love, represented through a joyous country and western hoedown. 

And after love comes the breakup, as another couple bicker hilariously over text about who gets to keep the expensive underwear. You get the sense that, by playing out these scenarios, the real people underneath are able to diffuse the tension or uncertainty that exists between them. It gets at something about how creating sketch comedy is such a weird way to relate to another person.

The only conventional choice they make comes near the end, where there’s a forced breakup of the friendship in order to provide a reconciliation at the end. In every other aspect, this is deeply idiosyncratic, deeply original and deeply funny stuff.

Review date: 19 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard