Charlotte Merriam brings their debut Edinburgh Fringe show Sad Bride to Pleasance Courtyard, a queer dark comedy exploring identity, online performance, and the pressures of modern womanhood. Drawing on real-life experience, the show offers a sharp and distinctive new voice at the festival.
Written and performed by Merriam, Sad Bride follows a protagonist obsessed with becoming the “perfect bride” while grappling with questions of identity and authenticity. Blending character comedy with biting social commentary, the piece tackles the wedding industry and digital culture with humour and insight.
Sad Bride runs from 5 – 31 August 2026 (not 18) at Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Two), with performances at 14:45. For more information and to book tickets visit here.
You’re writing and performing Sad Bride at Pleasance Courtyard. What can you tell us about the show?
Sad Bride is a queer solo dark comedy telling the story of Bride Thompson, a woman who was cursed as a child to never be happy until she finds a man and marries him.
Having forgotten this curse, the play follows Bride through her attempts to marry and “fix herself” in the process. Her story is told through multimedia and through the voices of the strange and beautiful characters in her life.
The show explores compulsory heterosexuality, the wedding industrial complex and the insidious world of self-creation on the internet through character comedy.
This is your playwriting debut at the Edinburgh Fringe. What inspired you to tell this story now?
Initially, honestly, I dismissed the idea a lot when it first arrived in my brain. Do people in 2026 want a weird show about weddings? Are there not more important things to see on stage?
But Sad Bride looks at the ways that the wedding industry forces people to perform gender in a strange environment and microcosm like nothing else. For women particularly, even in a world where they aren’t afraid to call themselves feminists, there remains a pressure to see their wedding as the biggest day of their lives and getting married (usually to a man) as the thing that will fix and complete them.
I see this in a lot of weddings I go to, and it’s really resonated with early audiences at previews of the show. The way that we as a society look at getting married and present it to women perpetuates the notion that being partnered is the only way to live well.
In a world of increased patriarchal pressure, the return of trad wives and wedding industry growth, I want to question through comedy what it means to find “the one” today.
Ultimately, it’s a show about being a queer little girl growing up to understand that about yourself, when all you’ve seen are princes and grooms waiting at the end of an aisle.
You explore themes like compulsory heterosexuality and the pressures of online womanhood. How do these ideas shape the character of Bride?
They entirely shape the character.
Bride is, in a way, the theatrical conclusion to the effects of social media pressure and compulsory heterosexuality on a person. I was interested in taking the absolute extremes of what society asks of women getting married and seeing a woman desperately attempt to enact all of these things.
Bride becomes completely obsessed with finding the right man who will “fix” her, as she knows, as many of us do, that she isn’t normal, but hopes that her wedding will make her so. It’s quite tongue-in-cheek, but it definitely all stems from the realities of womanhood, and particularly queer womanhood.
I was also interested in self-perception and the experience of being a woman online, thinking a lot about gaze, being looked at and looking. Obsessed with her own image and perfection, Bride becomes an internet troll, trying to improve her own reflection by destroying other people’s.
Through this, I’m trying to interrogate, again by pushing things to a real and comic extreme, what the aim for perfection can do to our self-worth.
Although Bride lives outside anything truly naturalistic, we still know her, perhaps more because of her strange specificity. She’s not particularly nice, she struggles with people and the world, and yet she’s helping us process our own darkness.
How has your real-life experience of the wedding industry influenced the tone and humour of the piece?
The idea for Sad Bride originally came from my own experience of getting married to my wife and how, even in a queer relationship, we couldn’t really escape the “bridal” pressures and expectations.
Every extremely gendered moment or old-fashioned idea I encountered felt both very funny and very sad, which is very much the tone of the show. Bride is a funny and sad person.
The form of storytelling that comes most naturally to me is character comedy. The woman I met in a bridal shop, the reluctant maid of honour, and the old PE teacher who somehow managed to find an invite all form Bride’s wedding party and world. We hear her story through their eyes.
They’re all pushed beyond the realm of normality, which we hope allows audiences to see her relationship with weddings with comic clarity.
I also love work that bridges the gap between theatre and comedy and wanted to make a show that sits between the two, telling a coherent narrative through different characters.
I was interested in what happens when other characters tell Bride’s story and how their perception of her shapes the narrative, thinking about how women look at themselves and each other in the world of social media.
What has collaboration with director Charlotte Vickers brought to the development of Sad Bride?
Charlotte is a brilliant director and I’m so lucky that she’s my absolute partner in crime on Sad Bride.
We’ve been working on the show for over a year and Bride has developed enormously during that time. Charlotte Vickers has the very special and rare ability to see the jigsaw pieces of a show in her mind and instinctively guide them into the right place.
She can make sense of chaos and holds both seriousness and silliness in equal esteem. We find our show funny together and will often question, “Is it just us that will get this?” only to shake our heads and say, “No, there must be others out there.” We hope there are!
Vickers is excited by both the form and content of the show and has worked with me and her very large brain to shape and direct Bride’s story.
We’re both so excited to debut her at the Fringe.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Sad Bride?
Come!
It’s for the Brides in all of you: the ones who’ve dreamt of their perfect match but worried they might not exist. The people who’ve had their own weddings and lived to tell the tale, and everyone who’s avoided it just in case.
The friends who’ve thought themselves undeserving of love. Those of you who struggle with your own strangeness.
Come and commune with Bride Thompson for an hour. We’d LOVE to see you there.
