Creepy Boys: SLUGS at Edinburgh Fringe ★★★★★
★★★★★ Creepy Boys: SLUGS | Summerhall
This review was first published in August 2025.
Sam Kruger & S E Grummett return to the scene of cult-hit Creepy Boys – and transcend to a whole new level of nightmarish brilliance.
When last seen disturbing all-comers in Summerhall’s Demonstration Room a couple of years back, Sam Kruger & S E Grummett had the effect of reassuring this reviewer that it’s just fine not to bring any more kids into the world!
Now, the Creepy Boys return to deliver what could well be the most unsettlingly brilliant hour that the same venue’s Red Lecture Theatre has ever seen.
Arriving as the titular slugs, and determined to avoid hot topics in favour of a celebration of pure fun and nothingness, Kruger & Grummet display some expertise in joyfully vacuous inanity – but before long, cracks of somethingness begin to spread web-like through the contextual void.
There are a bunch of topics the Creepy Boys really don’t want to get involved with here – especially gender identity. But the harder they try to avoid it, the more unavoidable it becomes. Despite all their best efforts, before long they cannot escape gender identity! The clowning around and endearingly DIY puppetry turns darker and darker, taking a morbidly game audience into a spiral of absurd dystopia. There are genitals! There are guns! There is Joni Mitchell!
The more anarchic, the more niche, the more willfully repugnant they become, the more outrageously transcendent SLUGS is. There’s a moment of sheer torture/terror inflicted with such rage that the word ‘stunned’ can’t possibly suffice – one of those priceless theatrical moments that produces a laugh, a gasp, and then a swollen silence.
Though SLUGS doesn’t propose to know the answer to societies ills, it has a way of illuminating them which is at once painfully explicit and sublimely powerful. It’s silly, so so silly, and enormously playful. But then it is intense, and confrontational, daring and in-your-face.
Are they the mad ones, or are we? Or are we all just part of the same shitshow, plummeting towards doom. If so, at least these Creepy Boys will ensure that the end times are never dull.
I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like: nice pubs, film marathons, not doing real marathons, bad comedy, plays/musicals with shorter second halves, and the Oxford comma.
