Review: Big Dog, Riverside Studios

Izzy Radford has written a sharp, funny comedy that turns the true-crime industry inside out and makes you laugh through your own discomfort. Big Dog is the follow-up to her acclaimed debut Seating Plan and offers a pacey look at the murky ethics of true crime storytelling: power, authorship, and our appetite for other people’s tragedies. This performance at Riverside Studios’ Bitesize Festival is a preview ahead of its Edinburgh Fringe run.

The premise is neat: Eve, Scarlett and Yasmin are ghostwriters, scripting a hit true crime podcast for its star – a presenter who is never seen nor met, and always too busy to bother with the girls doing the work. It’s absurd world-building that quietly asks who gets credited, and paid (or underpaid), for the stories that make the company its money.

Eve (Tumba Katanda) is a principled Cambridge grad ready to question everything the company does. Her onboarding under manager Yasmin (Lauryn Jenkins) sets the tone – reams of notes on her writing, boiling down to ‘too wordy, dumb it down, give us the gruesome details’. Scarlett (Radford) is determined to become Eve’s work bestie, a friendship doomed once it emerges Eve doesn’t know her own star sign. There’s a sinister edge under the silliness. When Eve does well, Scarlett rewards her with a ceramic pet lamb – a memento of a real lamb the company has ‘adopted’ for her in Colombia. Sweet, except the company stops paying after a month, and if Eve doesn’t cover the bill, that makes her the monster.

Scarlett is a joy. Bubbly, scatterbrained, cheerfully convinced her promotion is just around the corner after two years of promises, unaware of how little power she has. It’s Eve who talks her into finally asking for the pay rise she’s never had. Yasmin is the only one who can supposedly speak to the unseen presenter, and runs the office with an obsessive precision, including the whiteboard “lamb bank”, updated whenever someone does good work. Radford has bottled a very of-the-moment strain of twenty-something camp here: the colleague who exists entirely as a highlight reel of TikTok sounds, personality replaced by whatever’s trending. It’s chronically online comedy at its funniest, and never punches down.

But it’s not all jokes. There’s a chilling thread in which the team watch horrific true crime clips – including femicides packaged for International Women’s Day content – with a desensitisation played for uncomfortable laughs. When commenters call out the exploitation, the team deletes the comments and carries on. That queasiness comes into focus with Eliza (Eleanor Cross), the best friend of a young woman whose murder became the company’s most profitable episode. Eve, trying to right the company’s wrongs, reaches out to her – a gesture that goes horribly wrong, and Cross brings a rawness that cuts through the show’s candy-coloured gloss.

Director Zoë Templeman-Young deserves a shout-out: the play is fast, snappy, and never misses a beat. Lighting and sound are impeccably timed and very TikTok, while the set and costumes go all-in on hot pink, with fluffy rollable stools instead of desks. The cast are excellent: Katanda’s righteous indignation, Jenkins’s tightly wound perfectionism, Radford’s misplaced confidence, and Cross’s gut-punch of a performance. Beneath the laughs, Big Dog asks who gets to tell stories about tragedy, who profits from them, and what that costs the people left behind. It’s smart without being smug, timely without being preachy, and enormous fun. And if you leave wondering whether you should feel guilty about your own true crime habit, well, perhaps that’s exactly the point.

Playwright: Izzy Radford
Director: Zoë Templeman-Young
Set and Costume Design: Grace Rumsey
Lighting Design: Jacob Henney
Sound Design: Pierre Flasse
Movement Director: Agatha Elwes
Produced by Currie Productions

Big Dog has completed its run at Riverside Studios and now heads to the Edinburgh Fringe at Gilded Balloon Patter House from Wednesday 5 to Monday 31 August.