Suitable material for the late-night Edinburgh Fringe slot this show has, it’s best not to read too much into this alternative narrative in which Adam (Jacob Schorsch) eats the ‘forbidden fruit’ instead of Eve (Mia Walsh Corbett). When a twenty-first century liberal (by American standards, anyway) (Sophia Drapeau) spots The Scientist (Genevieve Goodman) with a time machine, she wants to use it to go back to the days of Adam and Eve (sorry, Eve & Adam – whose rib was yanked out to create whom?) and change the course of world history by getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit instead of Eve.
There are seemingly no red lines in this show, with practically everything up for teasing some comedy out of. Naturally, the religiously devout are likely to take umbrage with some of what goes on, but then the religiously devout probably see the entire Edinburgh Fringe as a synagogue of Satan anyway. In other words, they’re not here, so let’s have fun with the overly formal (by contemporary standards) sentence structure of the creation account as it appears in the King James Bible. Let’s have fun exploring how the world might well be if the gender roles were reversed, with women as traditional breadwinners, captains of industry and political leaders (and so on) and men giving birth (the description of how this would happen is quite hilarious, in my opinion).
It does get more than a bit absurd, but as I began by saying, if you’ve been out seeing shows all day at the Fringe and you’re settling in for this one starting at 10:15pm, you’re more likely than not ready for something beyond ridiculous. The time machine gets used by The Angel – accept no substitutes (Kathleen Salazar) – to travel forward from whenever the start of the Book of Genesis was to ‘the future’, and comes back having been mesmerised by a performance of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. It’s silly, it’s hammy, it’s a barrel of laughs, and it’s strangely sublime.
Review by Chris Omaweng
This satirical comedy follows a present-day woman determined to fix everything by going back to the very beginning. Obsessed with enemies-to-lovers stories, hoping to win back her ex, and convinced that history took a wrong turn in the Garden of Eden, she travels through time to persuade Adam – not Eve – to bite the forbidden fruit. Combining sharp satire with biblical mythology, Eve & Adam is a bold and hilarious exploration of gender, power, and the stories we inherit.
God – Simon Rabatin
Eve – Mia Walsh Corbett
Adam – Jacob Schorsch
The Angel – Kathleen Salazar
The Apple – Sophia Drapeau
The Scientist – Genevieve Goodman
Written by Genevieve Goodman
Directed by Jillian Roche
EVE & ADAM
theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall at the Edinburgh Fringe
17 to 29 August 2026
