HR The Musical – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Picture: Jinki Cambonero

HR The Musical continues at Big Yin at Gilded Balloon Patter House until 31 August 2026 (except 17).

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This unusual sketch comedy musical offers an absolutely hilarious and thought-provoking participatory experience. Its content is an extremely relatable investigation into the sort of themes that come along if you have ever played Bullshit Bingo in a committee meeting, been in the sandpit on a compulsory staff training day, or just observed the ins and outs of intra-employee relations and management of a difficult and irrepressibly sexist boss as in British hit comedy The IT Crowd.

Amy Mansfield’s show, composed, written, produced and performed by herself with actor-colleagues Mika Austin and Jessica Robinson, offers a unique opportunity for audiences to appreciate and shape a musical exploration of the highs and lows of corporate culture.

So much is packed into this entertaining compilation of workplace scenarios that the theatre turns efficiently into a hotbed of negative cliches. Even the chance to interpret the emotional side of toxic workplace dynamics through contemporary dance is not missed. That this occurs to the romantic aria ‘Mansplain it to me’ does reveal which side of the gender political divide this theatre company’s diversity policy lies, especially as it ends on a blue note.

Between start and finish this talented trio of resurgent white feminists – with rapping skills resistant to AI – brings about a concept change, reframing their out of the box identities from clowns to union members. It sounds silly, and in many ways it is, but they make it possible for many followers to rise in support and celebrate.

This show is surprisingly cathartic in its passion for all things human resources, but also in its collective chants, cheering and chance to rehearse its values folksong ‘Boundarilessness’ with feeling. Ultimately, it offers a cheery upbeat message proving that driving positive change can work if it’s thought about in a different way. This comes after the audience is plunged into a pent-up morass of large-scale, end-to-end transformative initiatives, forced to recall the perils of petty form-filling, emails that squeeze the life out of you one gentle reminder at a time, and the wilful abandonment of policies in the face of thousands of applications for humdrum jobs.

An orchestral soundtrack featuring ironic trombones and responsive violins with costuming including feather boas adds welcome colour to the ‘Town Hall’, a meeting which develops into a risqué corporate jazz anthem ‘Lay Your Global All-Hands On Me’. And of course, transparency goes mad once the three performers start bringing their whole selves to work.

A LinkedIn-inspired spoken word piece ‘The St H.R. Passion’ brings managers cloaked Traitors-style out of the closet, and later a dominatrix willing to take on extra work highlights common struggles to meet KPIs. The audience is encouraged to jingle keys percussively to accompany that dark number, perhaps suggestive of the rattling of chains, as the show reaches its climax.

At a Saturday choir practice, the audience is divided into departments for choral singing in the round, moving from ‘Now I wann’ it’ to ‘Now we wann’ and finally ‘won it’. It’s impossible not to be swept up in this call to resistance, particularly with the very boppy ‘Things Aren’t Meeting Expectations’. Thank goodness the members of this plucky trio never loses their willingness to clarify, which brings the show to a theatrically communal and joyous conclusion. Roaring in the aisles proves that the time really is ripe for this ‘performance revue’.

Charlotte Purkis