Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies had a memorable television treatment in 2022, and a brand new stage adaptation – to which the writer has given his blessing – is one of the Fringe’s 2026 hot tickets. It’s immediately clear why.
Leith-based site-specific specialists Grid Iron theatre have requisitioned a grimy but wonderfully characterful warehouse as the cavernous setting for O’Hagan’s heartbreaking story of youthful, identity-forming joy and later-life tragedy. With its towering brick walls (put to excellent use with Lewis den Hertog’s colourful, clever video projections and Simon Wilkinson’s evocative lighting), its overhead galleys and its blacked-out windows, it’s a space that’s itself full of memories. And it plays a central role in the production, most successfully in the show’s exuberant first half, as eager Scottish teens Noodles and Tully go wild on music and life in 1980s Manchester, as well as cementing what’s already a brotherly intimacy.
Recent graduate Jude Bain makes his professional stage debut as Tully, and delivers a joyfully sly, charismatic performance, even if Harrison’s adaptation doesn’t place his character as quite the dazzling lodestar he is in O’Hagan’s novel. Fellow recent graduate Kieran Devine is more inward-looking as the quieter Noodles, but captures the 18-year-old’s appealing mix of fragility and determination beautifully. As a gritty G-Mex Centre, a luminous Haçienda nightclub and even a secret rooftop swimming pool, the Leith warehouse adds enormous depth and character to the production.
Then the teens get older, and things change dramatically. O’Hagan’s heartbreaking halfway plot twist is hardly unknown, but I won’t spoil it here. After the show’s midpoint shift, however, the warehouse is a good deal less convincing in the fraught and largely static discussions between four adults – indeed, quite a bit of narrative and emotional detail gets lost amid its boomy acoustic, despite some sensitive amplification. And it’s not easy to feel the cool, clinical cleanness of Switzerland amid its vast, post-industrial interior, even with the memories it provides of the earlier revelry.
Nonetheless, Graham Mackay-Bruce (pictured above right, with Lucianne McEvoy and Matthew Pidgeon) makes a thoughtful, sometimes volatile adult Tully, and Matthew Pidgeon is commanding as a grown-up Noodles, also narrator of the whole thing. Lucianne McEvoy stands out, too, as Tully’s partner Anna, barely able to face her grief, and balancing love and resentment precariously.
More could probably have been made of the connections, parallels and memories between the timelines in Harrison’s otherwise lucid, perceptive adaptation, and the second half’s calmer, more introspective mood takes time to settle after the glorious hedonism and sheer noise (including a brilliantly curated soundtrack courtesy of David Paul Jones) of the lads’ teenage years. But it gets there in the end, in a conclusion that’s increasingly quiet and narrowly focused.
Mayflies is just the kind of thing the Fringe excels at, however: an unforgettable, lavish but also fleeting show that bursts into brilliant life only to disappear again, and whose very ephemerality captures the book’s themes exquisitely. Like life itself, catch it while you can.
