Harriet Richardson is perhaps best known for spending St Valentine’s Day 2024 going on one hundred dates – they were online, and each video call lasted five minutes. Being a ‘performance artist’, some of the dates were filmed for an exhibition later that year, and some were livestreamed on her Instagram page (obviously, with consent). There were no parameters as to who she wanted to ‘date’, inverted commas mine, with the invitation extended to anyone regardless of personal characteristics. Naturally, she was subjected to criticism: were these ‘real’ dates, given there was no in-person interaction? Well, they were all real people, and as one might reasonably suspect, some of them were quirky characters, to put it mildly. Taken together, they provided some comedy gold, and the audience for this show got to see selected highlights.
The show included some highly observant explorations of expectations placed on women by certain types of men. For all the strangeness of the general public on online dates, the creepiness of the show’s title was manifested by private correspondence with a guy Richardson was not and is not at liberty to name. The only substantial clue is that he made an appearance on Taskmaster, which incidentally itself began life at the Edinburgh Fringe before being adapted for television later. Such was the nature of the private messages both in terms of content and volume, the guy’s management eventually stepped in and put a stop to it. It is hardly a spoiler to reveal that one of the messages contained a picture of the guy’s manhood.
Much is packed into this hour-long show, including interactions with a local vicar whose church is across the road from Richardson’s gym of choice, and having a tattoo containing the (first) names of all the mothers (no duplicates permitted) of every man she has slept with to date. Particularly memorable, at least to me, was a private investigator called Michael Evidence, who always refers to himself in the third person, hired to help Richardson get all the names she needed.
An often mischievous storyline told by a performance artist whose Edinburgh Fringe debut is a resounding success.
Review by Chris Omaweng
When anonymous trolls move beyond misogyny, celebrities lurk in your DMs and dating apps, and real-world relationships disintegrate, how do you know where the real you ends and the performer begins?
Creep is a darkly funny show about obsession, parasocial desire, and the permeable barrier between on and offstage performance. Armed with a growing body of evidence, you get to decide who the real creep is here – Harriet or the men who live online.
HARRIET RICHARDSON: CREEP
Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe
5 to 30 August 2026