one4review | On 22, Aug 2026

Lou (Michele Stine) is a janitor who struggles to make connections with other people. In fact she finds it much easier to talk with the puppets she makes herself out of the various bits of thrown away plastic and other trash she picks up. So when she comes home to discover an entire audience of people watching her, she creates characters for them to hold to speak to instead of addressing anyone directly. But this gives her the perfect opportunity to finally ask some important questions about how she could start forming the friendships that have somehow alluded her.
Stine gives an enchanting performance as the imaginative, naïve and cripplingly shy Lou and her skills at psychical comedy, puppetry and all around old fashioned clowning breathe life into her puppets made from plastic bags and discarded clothes. The show has a lot of audience participation, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say audience engagement as Lou hands the puppets she creates out to the crowd, first giving them each a basic personality (a mouth that only says “grump”, a bell that can only “ding dong”) that gently but powerfully brings everyone into the play session into her world of make believe friends.
While billed as a comedy and there’s certainly laughs to be had, the show is more about the exploration of Lou’s loneliness, or rather her inability to understand the unspoken rules that govern human interaction – should you make eye contact? Maybe. Should you avoid raising your voice? Sometimes. Should you be kind? Always. She directly asks the audience how communities are formed and it’s both enlightening and telling that the audience struggles to find any easy answers.
It’s an experience that I think will be familiar to a lot of people, especially those with neurodiversity where it can often feel like you’re the only person who struggles with knowing how to be human when everyone else seems to do it with ease.
That said, I don’t want to give the impression that this is a heavy show just because it deals with some big themes. Lou is so inherently likeable and the situation so ridiculous that you never feel like it’s dwelling on the negative.
A more laid back affair than many clown shows at the Fringe this year, Always, Sometimes, Maybe is a delightful little snowglobe of a thing, intimate and beautiful and a lovely way to spend an hour.

****
Reviewed by Tom
18:25

7th-30th

Playground 3 at ZOO Playground