Written by Anna Skov Jensen

Directed by Johan Sarauw

Review by Moyra Jones

Pleasance Dome – King Dome

You walk into the space and come face-to-face with a man trapped in a glass box – his sleek, sterile corporate prison. You take your seat, put on headphones, and are immediately hit with the sound of ‘Money Honey.’ It’s a disquieting setup: there’s no sound in the room, only what plays through your headphones. The immersion begins the moment you plug in.

Despite the complexity of seating an entire audience and fitting them with functioning headphones, the preshow runs with impressive efficiency. The stage management team has the entire auditorium plugged in and ready before the official start time – no mean feat for a Sunday Edinburgh Fringe audience.

The play follows a young, unnamed tax lawyer and his descent from clever, ambitious idealist to a central figure in the German State Crown’s international dividend tax fraud case.

Anna Skov Jensen’s script is deft and layered, seamlessly moving between real time and flashbacks. It has the allusion of a modern retelling of the Prometheus or Icarus myth – timely and timeless. What drives a man to seek playing God? To fly too close to the sun? The script makes the end clear from the beginning, so the true drama lies in watching the young family lawyer unravel. A process Christoffer Hvidberg Rønje conveys with specificity and striking physicality.

At one point, when recruiting someone into the fraud, the lawyer compares their crime to running a red light on an empty road at night. It’s a clever analogy that raises disturbing questions: are we all so susceptible to corruption?

Direction and design by Johan Sarauw and Signe Krogh, respectively, are conceptually tight and theatrically precise. Krogh’s design is simple yet cinematic. What begins as a glass-walled corporate prison transforms fluidly into a park or café through videographic back walls – yet always retains the sense of being inside. Even in naturalistic scenes, something feels off. As the character spirals, the visuals darken and distort, shifting from realistic to nightmarish.

Sarauw’s direction works in perfect tandem with the design, maintaining a claustrophobic sense of entrapment. The lawyer draws directly on the glass walls with a white marker – drawings that help tell the story while also creating visual clutter. At one moment, the white marker becomes a line of cocaine, smeared across the screen in a raw, chaotic gesture. It’s visceral. Disturbing. Brilliant.

The sound design is a technical and emotional triumph. Every detail – from the crack of knuckles to the groan of the filing cabinet – is rendered in binaural audio, enveloping the audience. You don’t just watch him unravel; you’re inside his head. The sounds, created by a team of designers and performed live by Hvidberg Rønje, enhances the illusion that the audience is trapped inside the box too.

As the lawyer descends further, time warps, the table shifts, and the space seems to shrink. The transformation is spectacular but never loses intimacy. In the final moments, Hvidberg Rønje steps out of the box. He is no longer The Insider. The sound – once confined to the headphones – suddenly floods the room. It’s a theatrically succinct and powerful shift. But the box remains. The cycle continues. The show ends, but the story lingers.

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