The King of All Birds – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Picture: Kilian Harrison

The King of All Birds continues at the Former Gents Locker Room at Summerhall until 31 August 2026 (except 17, 24).

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Although Martha Knight begins her show perched as a bird, dressed in a beady-eyed papier-mâché-crafted mask, gathered tweed cloak and bin bag plumage, she is not in fact being the King we think we have come to see, but is merely his representative.

She takes a childlike delight in sharing with us how she can twitch her beak up, peck gathered berries and sup from a 21st century plastic water bottle, just to pluck away any false illusion. An informal cocking of heads establishes that we are actually all present to name a successor.

Knight reads from an ancient book which she has used to research this wide-ranging historical show. Past events are retold from a perspective that is often quite gendered because this is Knight’s discovery of an aspect of her heritage. She does ruffle some feathers. A flock of rather foolish men and their flying machines are conjured up quite literally by the performer’s embodiment of pilots. All of this aviation reenactment follows on from the tale of the murder by Norman ‘wren boys’ of the female wren who queened it over birdland and whose reign had preceded the sanctification of King Sweeney.

Amidst the hapless chaps who had used Ireland as a base for activities, are tales of some plucky ladies, including Lilian Bland, who found a green use for whiskey as a fuel, until her father stopped her.

Technology becomes a key part of Knight’s story and adds a comedic touch. Iona National Airways apparently led aerial photography fashion by knocking out camera-carrying pigeons who are lovingly remembered for their efforts in this bird-related Irish history, although no one knew what they were actually up to.

Musically, a simple device of repeated phrases from Robert Tannahill’s emotional traditional song ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, variously articulated, underscores a narrative dominated by birds, planes and drones. The classic ballad which has crossed from Scotland to Ireland and now returns with the Fringe is an evocative refrain pertinently evoking summertime and a lassie as Knight recalls past holidays. The echoing rondo character articulates a defiant non-linearity formed out of memory and tradition.

Knight’s quirky storytelling practice creates new musical theatre for how it is constructed within an innovative sound design, the nature of which is hard to express in words. The soundscape is a physical residue of human effort comprised of breathy flutey chirps, hums and buzzes which build to a massive synchronisation of a murmuration as we ‘all go together’ over the ‘blooming heather’ into avian clouds.

A soundscape is made in real time from musical interpretations of the folksong, and associated noises sourced from its methods of communication, via standard folk instruments blended with live electronics by means of a vocoder operated on stage by the creator-performer. It is auspicious how Knight quite literally wings it!

Haunting tweets of ballad are woven intricately into the chronology which shapes a bird’s-eye ‘aerial’ view of space, place and identities focused, we are told, on Knight and her grandmother on the ‘Costa del Bog’. Once granny has been visited by King Sweeney, the plot moves swiftly on to the accompaniment of a complex aural spatiality which has rather become more the subject than the object of our new world view.

Simultaneously sparse and dense in its feeling, the ending is emotive as the camera pans its bird’s-eye view over Knight’s granny’s house and we finally witness the tiny aerial photograph which inspired the construction of the whole show. And so, the landmark matriarchal homestead from Dromady, County Mayo, Ireland gains perhaps a deeper meaning as a symbol of environmental durability and a site of spiritual significance.

Joy Nesbitt directs Knight’s quixotic creativity in such a way as to turn childish fantasy into quasi-mythological reality, or is it rather the other way around? There is much to reflect on after experiencing this small but mighty song in the sky that flies in the face of a buried golden age of Irish aerialism.

Charlotte Purkis