We’ve been to Fringe shows in a lingerie shop, a Laundromat, travel agent’s, cafes, central city office – it was only a matter of time until we were ushered into a toilet. 

Engaged is Mara Gold’s baby – it’s her idea, she directs it and is one of the disturbing assortment of people who we meet, like it or not, as we lounge around the sinks and cubicles.

It’s intriguing, unnerving and voyeuristic, all good things for a show like this, though some people stayed well back from the in-cubicle action (secret eating, secret drinking, sobbing, graffiti, perving, oral sex, same old same old). 

Some of the characters were there too fleetingly seen for us to get to know them or to care, but overall it was well thought through and executed by the cast of ten. 

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Only at the Fringe could I find myself lurking in the Ladies Loo – a spacious amenity at the Michael Fowler Centre – to witness variously nefarious interactions in the company of strangers.

The glimpses we get depend entirely on where we happen to be standing and it’s our business to get ourselves where we can see and hear. And if whatever seems to be the main action is a bit inaccessible at any given moment, there’s always something else to note of you look around. So everyone’s experience of this show will be necessarily different.

A couple of ditzy girls, Jackie (Kate Green) and Shelley (Rosie Morgan) are in and out, gossiping, fixing lippy, getting lippy, shaving legs … and one, clearly delighted that some Adonis (Reuben Brickell) wants to "do" her, secures his services as a ‘cunning linguist’ in a cubicle before discovering he expects to be paid.

Soon after, his ‘omnisexuality’ is very confronting to a spaced out small time drug pusher, Sid (Jesse Smith) who has lost something important after doing a deal with a cool customer called Sam (Ginny Spackman) who later loses equilibrium in the process of taking a pregnancy test …  

Meanwhile Kim (Mara Gold) a particularly aggressive and jealous lesbian comes on strong to Brodie (Phoebe Dengate-Thrush) who submits to what seems like pleasure at the time but afterwards neither is happy or loving. Brodie does have a happier encounter later, I think, but I can’t quite recall who with.

Maybe I’ve got too preoccupied with the ball of red knitting wool which I think belongs to the graffiti-writing anarchist Paige (Harriet Myles), or Greg the up-chucking bulimic guy (Stuart Moore) – who also perves on Sam from the next-door cubicle … Or the androgynous person who must have been what my cast list calls ‘Butch Lesbian’ (George Mapplebeck). 

Compared with Hotel, last year’s site-specific hit, Engaged is not as, well, engaging because the relatively contrived action is not so ultra-naturalistic and we are not so well-placed to absorb ourselves into the characters’ lives and find points of empathy.

Strangely I get no sense of being a secret voyeur on people’s private moments in a public convenience, but the different dynamic that comes from strangers milling together amid these dodgy dealings does add a novelty factor to the experience.

As a work of alternative theatre for the Fringe – preceded (on opening night anyway) by lovely wine and nibbles – Engaged does the business with enough flair to please most patrons. At just 35 minutes it is either too short to deliver the potential of what it sets up, or it’s short enough not to make the exercise tedious for the standing audience. As I say: everyone will have a different point of view.
  

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