Samantha Ipema brings their powerful stage debut Dear Annie, I Hate You to the Edinburgh Fringe 2025. This multimedia production, fresh from its acclaimed London run, explores the raw and real experience of being diagnosed with a brain aneurysm at just 20 years old.
The show blends dark humour, live video, and immersive sound design to tell a deeply personal story. With ‘Annie’ – the personified aneurysm – as a brutally honest companion, the performance dives into themes of mortality, identity, and disability.
Catch Dear Annie, I Hate You at Pleasance Courtyard (Pleasance Two) from 30 July to 25 August (not 31 July, 1–3 or 12 August) at 12:00. Tickets available here.
You’re bringing Dear Annie, I Hate You to Pleasance Courtyard – what can you tell us about the show?
It’s a wild 60-minute ride that will leave you laughing, crying, and probably questioning your own reality (in a good way, hopefully).
It’s a show that I wrote based on my life when I was 20 years old and diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, which I think makes the show sound very serious—but in reality, it takes us from all the joys of growing up and playing pretend as a kid to an All-American Spring Break.
It’s been to the Fringe before, but this iteration is much bigger, and much, much more visceral.
The show is based on your own experience with a brain aneurysm. How did you approach turning something so personal into a stage production?
Oof. First off, with a lot of support from family, friends, and fellow creatives—and making them read many, many terrible drafts and versions of the piece before finally finding an iteration that worked.
But I always knew that the show needed to be about a universal theme beyond just “being diagnosed” with something life-changing. For me, it was the time in my life where my entire identity changed—who I was on the inside, and who I appeared to be on the outside.
I began to essentially write a diary entry from that place of original rupture in my life and what I felt led to it and unfolded after it. Then I shared that on stage.
‘Annie’ is a unique character – the personification of your aneurysm. What inspired that creative choice?
I always knew I wanted to anthropomorphize her. To me, it was the only way to accurately portray this thing that suddenly came crashing in and (seemingly) destroying everything in sight.
She also was the best vessel I could think of to discuss an identity crisis on stage—literally having your One-Woman show crashed and ruined by this other ‘bigger and better’ thing inside your head.
Aside from that, the decision was reaffirmed when I was scrolling through a Reddit feed one day with other brain aneurysm survivors and I noticed they all referred to their aneurysms as ‘Annie’. That was really astounding to me at the time, and none of them had even pointed out how interesting that was.
Other people with life-threatening conditions I’ve met along the way have done the same with their own diagnoses as well. I think that really affirmed to me there was something worth doing there.
The show blends multimedia, live performance, and even depicts brain surgery on stage. What was the process like developing such a visceral experience?
Fun, highly collaborative, and honestly—quite stressful.
The show works in unison with all of its creative elements, much like how the brain actually functions. So it was always important that everything folded into and supported one another, particularly between the design elements and the actors interacting with them.
It’s a lot of composing the elements in the room together and having conversations leading up to it about where we want to take moments of the show. It’s fun and, hopefully, just the start of where we want to keep developing the show.
Your brother Micah, who has Down’s syndrome, features in the show. How important was it for you to include your real family in the storytelling?
Yes, he’s the real star of the show.
It was always very important that Micah himself, if he was going to be represented on the stage, was done as himself. I think when you see the show, you can see why it’s important. He’s magnetic and entirely true to himself in every circumstance, so you can’t help falling in love with him in the same way I did when we were kids.
My parents, on the other hand, were something I was worried about because they are certainly not actors. So, I was quite concerned about whether or not it was going to work, in all honesty!
But in the original version of the piece, I actually just lied to them and told them I was videotaping them because the sound bites would be better and that they were just going to be used in the sound design. That took the pressure off of them ‘performing’ and allowed them to be real and honest.
And it is still, to this day, I think my favorite moment on a stage—watching their shock and awe when their faces popped up on the screens in the show.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Dear Annie, I Hate You?
I would say just do it.
The show isn’t something you really can explain or read about. I think it’s just something the general public needs to see to witness.
It will certainly make you laugh, it will probably make you cry, and I think it will leave you thinking about life very differently if you let it.
Or at least, it will be something that you leave going, “What on Earth have I just watched for an hour?” Which is everything you hope for at the Fringe, isn’t it?
