Safety is a dark comedy following a psychotherapist who reconnects with a former client. While he only means to help, their relationship slowly shifts, and everything is not as it seems. The play marks the launch of Light Mends Carefully, a new Scottish theatre company dedicated to exploring how systems of care can end up harming queer people.
Ahead of the play’s Fringe run, we spoke to writer Michael Reid to learn more about this intriguing play.
Monologues and Musicals: Can you start by telling me a bit about your show?
Reid: Safety is a solo play about Adam, a psychotherapist who prides himself on seeing past psychiatric labels—on treating people as people rather than diagnoses. When a former client stops attending sessions and won’t leave his thoughts, they reconnect and the boundaries of the professional relationship begin to blur. It’s a taut, unsettling hour about the charged dynamic between client and therapist: who gets believed, who gets diagnosed, and how much power sits on one side of the consulting room.
What inspired you to write it?
I spent five years working in crisis support and suicide prevention in a team that operates in and works with mental health professionals. I am a huge proponent of and evangelist for psychotherapy, but it’s also a very complex profession and one where the emotional charge between client and therapist—as well as the power dynamics of the relationship—have to be very closely monitored. I wanted to write about a relationship where the boundaries become blurred, and about how easily someone with good intentions can end up losing the thread of right and wrong.
Why was it important to you to write the show through a queer lens?
Adam learned to read people long before he had language for why—growing up gay often teaches us to watch closely, to work out whether attention is safe or dangerous. That vigilance becomes his professional skill, and it’s also his blind spot. And queer people have a particular history with psychiatry: we were the diagnosis, once.
Do you have any projects lined up after the Fringe that you would like to share?
I am working on a play about the climate crisis, as well as one inspired by domestic violence and control in queer relationships. I’m also excited to have finished my first sitcom pilot.
What do you hope that audiences will take away from your show?
I’d like people to leave feeling conflicted! The play doesn’t hand you a verdict—it asks you to sit inside one person’s account of events and then notice how much of what you believed was interpretation. If anyone leaves thinking a bit harder about whose version of a story gets to become the official one, that’s more than enough.
If you could choose one song as the soundtrack for your show, what would it be and why?
We actually have a beautiful bespoke soundtrack to Safety by the wonderful Dominic Brennan! It adds so much to the piece and I can’t wait for audiences to hear it. But since it’s Madonna summer this year, maybe I’ll also say ‘Open Your Heart’… have a re-listen to the lyrics of that song after you’ve watched the show and you might be able to work out why I’m saying that…
Safety will be performed at Daisy at Underbelly – Bristo Square from 8-30 August (not 18, 25) as part of Edinburgh Fringe.
Words by Ellen Leslie