Power

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Power 〰️

The Edinburgh Fringe is back for 2026, and with it, our annual feature series! This year, we’re taking on POWER: Who’s got it? Where is it? Where should it be? How do you get it? Our comedians are the only ones with the answers.

By Lil Wenker

When I was in fifth grade, I had three best friends. We did everything together—sports, bookclub, our homework after school. We were very cool. One day, I decided to write a musical (not much changes, kids) about lunch. Creatively, it was called Lunch. I cast myself, along with the three other girls, as various lunch foods who got into musical conflict about which was most liked by the school children. In addition to writing and performing, I also named myself as the director.

Upon my self-proclaimed rise to power, I became ruthless.

When Sophie came to rehearsal without her lines memorized, I lectured her on the importance of being prepared in showbusiness. Katie spoke too quietly and had absolutely no charisma on stage, Emma forgot her props and was generally “lacking a certain x factor,” and you better believe they didn’t hear the end of it! Until…fed up with my power grab, their mothers called my mother to deliver the news: they quit.

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Dethroned, I had to crawl back and grovel, hoping that my friends would let me back into the inner circle. In an instant, my entire social standing lay in the hands of three prepubescent girls who’d been berated for not “fully inhabiting the emotional stakes of how it felt to be Pizza and Salad.” I was paranoid, irritable, and embarrassed. I was Icarus.

The truth is, playing the power game results in the same story again and again. Secretly, I think most of us want it more than we let on. Why else is it so satisfying to tell people off when they board the train before the other passengers get off?

The thought “I want to feel big/important/heard” is, at its core, a very relatable thought. In many ways, it’s also quite comedically tragic — the ways people try to rectify this void in their mundane and often very powerless lives.

In making BOYKING, I wanted to explore first and foremost the origin of our hunger for power before writing it off as wholly egotistical. And then I wanted to explore the inevitably of it all—the insatiability that power almost always brings and how hard it is to learn from our past mistakes when it tries to seduce us all over again. Afterall, I’ve made a musical again! Maybe I haven’t learned my lesson!

Lil Wenker: BOYKING is running at Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker 1) from Aug 5-30th (except 17th) at 21:45. Tickets here