Bunny

With writing credits that include Skins and Shameless, Jack Thorne is known for writing snappy lines for disenfranchised teens. Quick, clever and encased in an urban poetry that both delights and resonates, he packs each sentence with a punch. No word is wasted, no repetition accidental, he has a track record of crafting pithy dialogues and Bunny is no exception.

Brought to Edinburgh by lauded new writing theatre company Nabokov, Bunny is a dynamic production of a sharp text. Rosie Wyatt’s Katie bounds into vivid and jabbering life in front of a cartoon background that mirrors her story frame for frame. Jenny Turner’s guileless illustrations and Ian William Galloway’s deceptively low-fi video design echo both Katie’s childish energy and adult knowing.

In a breathless metropolitan drawl, Katie describes an accident with an ice cream that leads to a manhunt. We watch as she slips down a rabbit hole through a sequence of remarkable occurrences. Thorne’s skill is to make each choice both the stuff of fantasy and totally acceptable; you are complicit with Katie through each decision and judgement.

Wyatt is engrossing as the lost girl at the centre of this journey. She is a bundle of teenage confidence and insecurity; one moment she’s a woman, the next a child, she plays each inflection of Thorne’s script beautifully.

There is a tangible undercurrent of desperation in Bunny that raises the stakes at each stage of this adventure; everyday situations take on the mantle of cruel victories and with a thrilling potency, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.