The Fringe Five | Hannah Jarrett-Scott, Norah Lopez Holden, Julia Grogan, Rachel Lemon and Lydia Higman

There is no way of describing Gunter that gives a proper sense of what it is like to experience Dirty Hare’s second production and its first at Edinburgh Fringe.

Explaining the plot doesn’t quite do it, but here goes anyway: in 1604, 19-year-old Anne Gunter seemed to become possessed by a witch. What actually happened is that her father forced her to act as if possessed, in order to get a local woman who had slighted him hanged for witchcraft. In the opening moments, co-creator Lydia Higman (part of Dirty Hare, alongside Rachel Lemon and Julia Grogan) plays a historian delivering the facts as if it were a lecture. Then everything kicks off. Dirty Hare turns the story into absolute theatrical chaos.

Gunter is giddyingly inventive and gleefully messy

It’s part-punk gig, part-folk gig, with Higman picking up guitars or bashing at drums and the other three performers (Hannah Jarrett-Scott, Norah Lopez Holden and Grogan) delivering exquisite harmonies. It’s also part-horror show, as blood trickles down limbs and mouths and spatters the white vests they are wearing; part-exorcism, complete with convulsing demon child; part-exploration of violence and masculinity and coercive control. It is really loud and features a bear mask being slathered with Golden Syrup.

A confident show from a company with a strong sense of the theatrical, this is a giddyingly inventive, gleefully messy way of rebalancing Anne’s story away from the witchcraft and towards its human actors: the man who maintained control, and the girl who had no choice but to enact his lies.