Some Fringe shows shout their worth from the rafters; others hum their way into your bones. After the Service: Tales of Love and Loss does the latter—and once it’s there, it stays. In a festival year swarming with work about identity and grief, Arran R Hawkins sidesteps the thematic herd, delivering something rare: a piece that refuses both spectacle and self-pity, and instead leans into the kind of quiet that rings louder than applause.

Before a word is spoken, the atmosphere is tuned like an instrument. Leonard Cohen murmurs, Jeff Buckley swells—heartbreak’s unofficial house band—and the room shifts. A chair. A small table. Barely a set, unless you count the fact that these objects belonged to the productions late relatives, making them silent witnesses as well as props. The audience doesn’t know this yet, but the stage is already haunted in the gentlest way.

Hawkins moves between two monologues, each a study in love’s endurance. First, we meet Bob, a playwright living in the long afterglow—and shadow—of Clive, his partner who died in the AIDS crisis nearly three decades ago. The 1980s gave us a cruel shorthand for gay men: flamboyant, promiscuous, dangerous. Bob dismantles it with quiet precision. His love story is domestic, ordinary, extraordinary—a kitchen table romance in the middle of a plague. The politics hum in the background, but it’s the unfinished conversations that keep you listening.

Then, without fanfare, a new voice emerges. A widow, recalling David, her husband of 57 years. Her memories aren’t gilded in sentiment; they arrive like old photographs pulled from a shoebox—creased, sometimes funny, sometimes devastating. The hardest blows land in the silences: a pause, a caught breath, the word she doesn’t quite finish. The humour that surfaces feels accidental, like a memory that insists on being told.

Hawkins never once nudges you toward tears, which is precisely why they arrive. No manipulative strings, no calculated swell. Just the belief that grief, when spoken plainly, is enough. And it is.

A third monologue, cut for time in the Fringe run, will return for the full-length production. The current two-hander feels whole, yet the prospect of more is a delicious ache—proof that sometimes the best art leaves you wanting the next chapter.

In a festival addicted to volume, After the Service is a masterclass in stillness. It reminds us that love doesn’t stop at the edge of a grave, that the act of telling is an act of keeping alive. This is theatre for the heart, the head, and the space between.

An unmissable triumph.