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★★★★ ‘Victoria Melody should be a national treasure’ – Time Out

★★★★ ‘A quirkiness and curiosity that is deeply appealing… and very funny’ – The Stage

★★★★ ‘A charisma that defies scientific classification’ – Financial Times

Selected as one of the best shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe by Time Out, The Times and The Stage.

What if success doesn’t look like winning a Nobel Prize (or just managing to get a mortgage) but is more about becoming your true self?

Sufficiently disillusioned with her theatre career that she shoved cake into a woman’s face (she deserved it, FYI), Victoria Melody turns to Plan B: stand-up comedy. But in her search for creative freedom, she finds constraints and rules that she struggles to fit herself to.

Keen to succeed, Victoria finds speech and language specialists who, at the grand old age of 40, diagnose her as neurodivergent. Cue a hyper-focused dive into dopamine mining, teaming up with a neuroscientist and performing with a Faraday cage on her head to explore the potential of stand-up as self-medication for ADHD.

A social chameleon, Victoria has previously become a pigeon fancier, northern soul dancer, beauty queen, championship dog show handler and funeral director, all in the name of art. But when she realises she’s hiding behind her headset on the comedy circuit, she starts to question: what it would feel like to really share herself, divergent and messy brain included?

Head Set is the chronicle of Victoria’s journey, a bonkers, hilarious and galvanising celebration of becoming your authentic self.

Photo by Steve Ullathorne