Written and Performed by Emily Beecher

Many of us lampoon the memoir solo show: it certainly makes up a staggering proportion of the Festival Fringe’s line-up. But these cathartic, brutally honest and sincere performances are often the fastest and most influential ways to connect with an audience. Summer Camp For Broken People is a prime example.

So, this Summer Camp they speak of – from the clinical tiles and those infamously painful blue chairs, there’s a much more therapeutic sense of time spent away than one of lake diving and campfires. A frank manifesto about the defragmentation of mental health and the fear of losing yourself, and then finding it again, Emily’s life is on the rocks.

A magnificently fiery and tightening fist of a show, which gradually grips tighter and tighter, cutting itself of blood, writer and performer Emily Beecher unfurls her life and our ridiculous excuses and frequent inability to deal with misogyny. From hating their therapist, downing whiskey and meds, prepping for Unicorn birthday parties and descending into a distressing and disturbing account of an incident with her nine-year-old daughter, and Beecher’s sexual assault at a Christmas party, Summer Camp For Broken People is a crucial piece of theatre, one we thank Beecher for making with such sincerity and openness.

An engaging, meritorious, and intense performer, Beecher utilises this autobiographical production to inform and tell her tale but adeptly navigates it into a generational one of the fears she has for her daughter manifests in this present world. Even with the complexities and difficulties of the events that Beecher retells, particularly that of PTSD and the long but eventual form of recovery, they never lose ‘them’ in the storytelling. There’s a curiosity with the baffling way in which the human mind deals with trauma and mental illness, and there’s still a nuanced and natural form of comedy in the exasperations Beecher exclaims as the whirlwind of it all begins to suck us into it all – no longer really an audience, more a part of all of this.

Unexpectantly, though of course welcome, Summer Camp For Broken People is one of the best-arranged shows at the Fringe; remarkably well-paced and structured in its aesthetical shifts incorporate a significant amount of video projections and stark lighting changes. Initially, they come over as jarring due to their unexpected nature, progressively becoming more intense and intrusive. They become an extension of the grief and trauma, constantly flaring at moments, washing away just as quickly, but the initial impact remains.

Somewhere between a traditional solo performance and even performance art with visuals and storytelling manner, Summer Camp For Broken People breaks away the barriers for audiences when we discuss the atrocities of rape. As the blaring, often disorientating, electric soundtrack echoes overhead, the gradual acceptance that not everything is fine is communicated in a virulently resonating manner in Beecher’s performance. Sometimes all we can do is be brave on this day and ensure that every one of us can openly say the three most powerful words a woman can hear: and no, not those romanticised ones. It’s about time that “I believe you” becomes the common response.