25 years ago Wiping My Mother’s Arse won a Fringe First at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Pitlochry Festival Theatre is to be applauded for bringing it back in a new, slightly updated, form.

But, it’s an interesting historical retrospective because, in attending this updated version of the play, one is inclined to conclude that the quality of Fringe Theatre has moved on.

It’s unquestionably an engaging 90 minutes of comedy theatre with much to love, but stood on a very tall pedastal, in the centre of that enjoyment, is the joyously brilliant performace of Larry (a care worker) by Johnny McNight. His history in pantomime makes his larger than life performance shine in a show that is too panto for its ambitions.

It’s all a bit ‘Bedroom Farce’ but its effective delivery is a tough trick to pull off. Certainly Jenny Booth’s brilliant, many doored, set gives the cast the material to play with, but only McNight is completely at home with this – frankly he can do this in his sleep, but his fellow performers are somewhat less convincing.

The script struggles from the off. The first act set up is quite laboured and the use of first person naming, again and again, unnaturalistic. But it has many, many LOL’s. However, if its writer, Iain Heggie, is trying to make searing political statements about the care service they fail to land, because it’s too comedic for that. Even the one moment of real pathos towards the show’s conclusion, where the challenges of ageing are starkly realised many audience members shrieked with laughter. This was so not the point.

Any criticism of the care system is masked by the high quality of care that Larry delivers for Andrene (Anne Kidd) – it’s exemplary and adorable. As a result we feel that this is a great place to be, even with the limbless June and Wee Fat Marie kicking about.

Moral issues are better served as the play questions whose money it is anyway.  It’s well known that the elderly are bled dry of their life savings to provide their later life care, so it seems both unlikely and illegal that Andrene’s son (and Larry’s  ex-lover) Derek (David Rankine) could simply help himself to over £400,000 to buy a houise for his new love, Kath (Lisa Livingstone). In fact, both of Derek’s relationships, past and present, are pretty hard to imagine.

His homosexuality is embraced happily by Larry, but for Derek it is a taboo that he doesn’t want either his mother or his girlfriend to know about, so his self denial is a key strand of the show. It makes for many funny and even farcical situations where his secret past may no longer be secret and this creates a tension throught the play.

But overall the production lacks real dramatic tension, the comedy is larger than life and this means that we fail to engage fully with the characters, with the exception of Larry, and the challenges they face in life.

Wiping My Mother’s Arse is at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until Sat 6 Sep 2026