Melbourne’s Hayley Edwards strides into the centre of the stage and immediately undercuts any expectation of polite Fringe theatre. She explains she’s just had great sex, but needs to apologise in advance — because she’s about to stink the place out. What follows isn’t just a cheeky opener, it’s a prelude to the real story: a sudden, brutal attack that sees her giving birth to what she describes as a jellyfish blood bag in a toilet cubicle. From there, she seeks help, and her life unravels into hospitals, diagnoses, and the long shadow of Crohn’s disease.

The piece charts both the physical battles — endless flare-ups, hospital stays, medications — and the mental toll of living with an invisible condition. Edwards navigates this territory with extraordinary candour, avoiding the traps of self-pity or oversharing. For such a dark subject there’s an astonishing amount of humour, and the show rattles along with energy and bite. Her journey takes in multiple partners of both sexes, manic highs, drug experiments, and the constant friction between wanting to live freely and being tethered by her own body.

There’s also an added irony in its staging. Performed in Summerhall’s old medical dissection theatre, with its steep lecture-hall seating, the clinical atmosphere adds weight to every detail. It’s as if the audience are both voyeurs and witnesses, complicit in the messy reality of her condition, but also learning from it.

Edwards is extraordinary as the sole protagonist. In lesser hands this could collapse into indulgent fringe fluff, but here the balance is spot-on. She is engaging, mischievous, and deeply human, never once playing for pity. The script is sharp and unflinching, peppered with bodily detail and mordant jokes. Comparisons to Fleabag will be inevitable, but they’re lazy; this is its own beast. At times it feels closer to a spiky update of The Vagina Monologues — except with more fibre, more vegetables, and a lot more shit stories.

Already a hit in Australia, Shitbag has legs to travel further in multiple formats. It’s fierce, funny, and absolutely necessary.