Directed by Jetse Batelaan

Review by Dominic Corr

The Traverse Theatre

Schrodinger’s Party Box.

That’s a pretty accurate description for It Would Be a Shame If You Missed Out, running at The Traverse Theatre as part of The Edinburgh International Children’s Festival. It’s unlike anything the festival has really seen; and for that alone, it has to be commended.

Chaos arrives wearing a mirrorball skin in It Would Be Such A Shame If You Missed Out, where three performers stride into The Traverse Theatre expecting a stage and instead find a throbbing monolith that looks like it escaped from a nightclub. The venue, in a stroke of administrative optimism, has double‑booked the space with a corporate party box in which ‘something’ is happening. The only thing is, the experience was meant to end hours ago. But, as they say, the show must go on, and the result is a theatrical turf war fought with bewilderment, basslines and the kind of existential dread usually reserved for office parties and first dates.

Director Jetse Batelaan orchestrates the mayhem with a wicked sense of precision. What begins as a simple case of “wrong room, wrong time” quickly mutates into a sly dissection of belonging, exclusion and the peculiar ache of watching everyone else have fun without you. The cube pulses, flashes and taunts, a silent bouncer with a god complex, while the performers attempt to salvage their show with the weary optimism of people who know the universe is laughing at them but are determined to carry on anyway.

The trio, played with effortless chemistry by Elias De Bruyne, Tim Van Dongen and Claudia Kanne, navigate the escalating disaster with a blend of deadpan resignation and frantic hope. Their attempts to perform even the simplest scene are obliterated by Toben Piel’s aggressively generic party tracks, each bass drop landing like a cosmic punchline. The humour is sharp, but never cheap, rooted in the performers’ ability to make catastrophe feel both intimate and absurdly universal.

As the cube begins selectively admitting people, the production sharpens its teeth. Who gets in, who is left outside, and who pretends not to care becomes the emotional engine of the piece. Kanne’s moment of questioning why she is assumed to be first through the door exposes the brittle hierarchies within the trio, while Van Dongen’s later survey of the rejected audience members carries a sting beneath the sarcasm. The show understands the quiet violence of social exclusion, and it wields that understanding with unnerving accuracy.

Fascinatingly, or perhaps terrifyingly, the frantic nature of FOMO (fear of missing out) begins to manifest almost physically. The resentments, the aggression, the dis-engagement which occurs from the initial wave of ‘missing out’ speaks volumes in a way Batelaan and the team have orchestrated perfectly. Groups within the theatre, or missing out on the initial round of entry, begin to get agitated; or wrose, resign themselves to pulling out their phones – dejected. It’s the worst thing a theatre can do, drive someone to their phone, but this illustrates the productions ideology perfectly.

By the time all three performers finally enter the cube, the comedy fractures into something stranger and more affecting. Masks appear, the party curdles, and the promise of belonging dissolves into a purgatorial loop of forced joy and creeping loneliness. Batelaan refuses to offer a neat resolution, instead grounding the ending in the quiet relief of friendship that survives the noise.

The design by Marloes van der Hoek and Wikke van Houwelingen is a triumph of timing and mischief. The cube reveals its secrets only when it chooses, flashing glimpses of ravers before snapping back to reflective indifference. It is pure theatrical trolling, and the audience laps it up. But rather like waiting in the VIP lane; time can drag a bit – and this is Theater Artemis’ only real drawback in the production. The initial punchline hits faster that the twenty or so minutes it allows to build; and by the end of the eighty minutes; you’re going to need a lie-down and a paracetamol.

Smarter than its chaos suggests and funnier than its philosophy warns, It Would Be Such A Shame If You Missed Out is a riot with a razor in its pocket, a party that knows exactly when to turn the music up and when to let the silence speak.

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