There is an interesting central question to Malaika Kegode’s new play Badgers: what happens when folk tales meet modern methods of communication. That is, until you start to unpick it: Kegode uses a podcast influencer to explore this question, except there’s nothing new to folk tales, true crime and podcasts - they’re already a natural fit.
Kegode plays our narrator, who tells us that we are Meles - a nepo baby podcaster who spends her time asking celebrities what their favourite sandwich is, while her mother garners international acclaim and Guardian bylines, even when she is terminally ill and unable to look after herself. She only gets replies to her BBC pitches when commissioning editors feel prompted to send their compliments to her mother.
A ten-year-old unsolved disappearance provides Meles to step out of her mother’s shadow and forge her own serious career, though it comes with unintended consequences as she finds a folk tale taking hold of the story she’s trying to shape.
Kegode’s text has moments of pure poetry, but too often it gets bogged down in exposition as she tells us about what ‘we’, as Meles, are thinking and doing. The framing feels forced and unnatural; Kegode’s attempts to endear us to our role are overly constructed as she nods or gestures to individual audience members. It rings untrue and, under Jenny Davies’ direction, it begins to have the feeling of a ‘choose your own adventure’ book but without the choice.
Even so, the story itself, with its twists and turns, is just about to hold you for its 70 minutes, aided by the life breathed into it by Joe Williams’s and Beth Robert’s folk-tinged music, composed by Jakabol. They give it drive when it needs it, and Robert’s otherworldly falsetto when things get spooky.
Jack Drewry’s sound design does its job of putting us in the podcast almost too well - you begin to realise that you’re not really watching anything. That may be accidentally appropriate: folktales have historically been an oral tradition, and while one of the central characters here may insist on her folk song not being recorded, you wonder if Kegode’s tale would be better put to tape. Perhaps as a podcast?
Badgers is at Traverse 2, Edinburgh, until 30 August 2026 as part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe
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