★★★★
Following the power-cut that affected half of Edinburgh (on the first day of the Fringe, of course), I ended up at theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall, where I was offered a ticket to Nicole Nadler’s Why Am I (Still) Like This. As strange as it sounds, I’m almost thankful for the outage: the show is truly a delight to watch.
Nicole has always felt different. She can remember being forgetful as a young child, and was frequently losing things and missing the school bus. She was also prone to emotional outbursts, which led to name calling and bullying from her peers. Many of these qualities still affect her as an adult, and she recalls a meeting at work where she was pulled up for her poor timekeeping and talking too much during meetings.
It’s not until Nicole stumbles across a news article on a random Tuesday afternoon during lockdown that she begins to realise why she – in her own words – cannot “behave like an adult”: she has ADHD.
The show follows on from the success of Why Am I Like This, which was a huge success at last year’s Fringe. Nadler discusses this extensively in this year’s show, explaining that while she always wanted to pursue acting, she was never able to for various reasons. Unexpectedly, she struggles with the success of last year’s run, and overlapping sound clips of people praising her for being so open and encouraging others to seek diagnosis perfectly demonstrate how overwhelming it is for her to be so heavily praised for something that has made her feel like an outsider for her whole life.
There are multiple scenes in which Nadler takes on the role of her inner critic, berating herself in the mirror and saying she wishes she was not alive. It’s difficult to watch, and Nadler must be commended for tackling this subject with such honesty and vulnerability. The use of the mirror is particularly effective as she moves it to both sides of the stage, almost creating the illusion of two separate people. The audience can only see Nicole shouting into the mirror in one segment, then as the mirror is turned, we only see her facial expressions, showing the anger and upset that the words are causing her.
While Why Am I (Still) Like This would benefit from a little more polishing, this is more than forgivable, and is bound to go smoother as the run goes on and Nadler becomes more confident in her abilities. In the middle of the performance, she makes a mistake that knocks her off her stride, leading to a couple of others. But this doesn’t take away from the quality of the performance, and in fact further demonstrates the ways that ADHD affects her. An insightful performance that gives us a tiny glimpse into the struggles that women with ADHD go through, Why Am I (Still) Like This is one of Fringe’s hidden gems.
Why Am I (Still) Like This will be performed at theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall at 6:10pm until 24 August as part of Edinburgh Fringe 2024.
Words by Ellen Leslie
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