The Dan Daw Show
Edinburgh International Festival
★★★★

“THE Truth We Seek” is the tagline for Edinburgh International Festival 2025 — whose initial dance feature is The Dan Daw Show. Daw has previously played the fringe, and it is pleasing to rediscover the man on a raised echelon. His visage even graces the city’s buses — with the EIF tagline amended to “seeking truth in motion.”

There is much besides motion in the vehicle that is The Dan Daw Show, which runs for a continuous 90 minutes; a kind of duration that is more usual in cinema. In collusion, cinematic sound design pulses throughout the timeline here, even when a punter might be happy with quiet. It is a device that evokes commercial facilities — their salve of angst and dodge of the pregnancy of silence. The persistent metre also enables precision in measure of the timed actions of the excellent co-devisors/performers Dan Daw and Christopher Owen.  

Episodes are stretched. There’s verbal exposition of what might happen. Thence set pieces are akin to gallery performances and their de-briefings. Things get to take as long as they take. Movement is motivated with unadorned clarity. We see that somebody stands up/goes over there/sits on a table because they are told to do so by somebody else.

We can penetrate this work. Its staging is bracingly minimal — except when it isn’t. Flurries of body-percussive pas de deux come upon the players and are gone, but not before we have clocked their urgent fluctuation of power and submission.

The whole is underpinned by probity and a massive idea. No smoke and mirrors. Instead, a haze of audience speculation. Essentially, Daw is a ravishing fellow who lives with a disability. He delights in achieving and sharing his Crip Joy, on theatrical terms of his own. His eponymous show renders the process of a queer BDSM hookup, with hurdles and balances thoroughly negotiated and with delicious commonalities buffed for display.

This is not just about a surface look at an alternative body. Ironies are mined. In a droll preamble, our instigator explained that he had consented to all that will ensue. Tour-guide like, he began to list an itinerary. When he discarded his mic (as commanded by his foil) and got on with it, relief in the house was palpable.

In most theatre, there is eroticism in the swooning yield to behaviour-as-scripted. Divas of all stripes ecstatically contrive and straddle a driver’s seat. Which of us has not compared live theatre to a consensual ordeal? Who among us would not thrill to be the tip of our collaboratively assisted iceberg, with personal passions unspooling in the embrace of trusted stage management — or SM, as it’s known in the business.

In this instance we are held by a transparent dialogue of control and spontaneity, edged by the embodied effect of fight-or-flight hormone rushes. We comprehend the thrill of tasked stillness and frictionless physical suspension. We discover matters other than what we sought.

Such outcomes could be universally expected of fine committed players. Here they are, skilfully fronting a show that feels like a genuine first encounter. This is more honed than the EIF truth-touting gambit allows. In any case, actuality can leave a bad taste in the mouth — witness our government’s tawdry push and pull around disability benefits, for example.

Run ended.