Complete genius. Salty Brine makes the impossible combination of Anne Frank, Neutral Milk Hotel and first love feel not only possible, but inevitable.
Kate Gaul
5 Stars
Venue: (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show)
Edinburgh Fringe Festival
2026
How do you take The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a cult 1990s album whose lyrics were themselves deeply entangled with Anne Frank, and somehow make the whole thing about first love?
Salty Brine does.
And somehow, gloriously, it makes perfect sense.
How Strange It Is is the latest instalment of Brine’s Living Record Collection, his extraordinary practice of taking an album and treating its tracklist as the blueprint for an entirely new theatrical world. Here, the world of Jeff Mangum’s songs collides with Anne Frank’s diary, Brine’s own adolescent journals, sexual awakening, longing, memory and the dizzying intensity of first love.
It is messy, hilarious, tender, occasionally bewildering and completely alive.
And at the centre of it is Brine himself: a consummate storyteller with a warm, generous and utterly inviting stage presence. There is something wonderfully intimate about the way he performs. Even when the material becomes enormous – Amsterdam, adolescence, sex, death, religion, desire, history, reincarnation and Neutral Milk Hotel – he somehow makes it feel as though he is sitting across from you telling you the story of the first person he ever loved.
Dates become a kind of mantra throughout the show, repeated, accumulated, obsessively precise. At first, they feel like another piece of Brine’s wonderfully unruly architecture; gradually they become something more affecting, a way of pinning enormous experiences of love, sex, loss and memory to the ordinary coordinates of a human life.
The staging is intimate and beautifully judged. The design creates a world that can expand and contract around Brine without ever overwhelming him, while the direction knows exactly when to let the material explode and when to bring us back to the person standing in front of us.
And then there is the band.
What a band.
The arrangements are sensational. Nate Weida’s musical direction and arrangements, alongside the original arrangements by Richard Aufrichtig and additional arrangements by Alex Thrailkill, transform Neutral Milk Hotel’s songs into something theatrical, unexpected and gloriously alive.
This is not a covers gig. The songs are taken apart, reassembled and made to serve the story. The musicians aren’t simply accompanying Brine; they are building the emotional architecture of the show around him.
Brine’s technical skill as a performer is extraordinary. He moves from speaking to singing almost imperceptibly, allowing a spoken phrase to gather rhythm and suddenly become song, or a melody to dissolve back into conversation. There is never a sense of “now I’m singing” – the two forms seem to exist in the same breath. It is an effortless-looking skill that is anything but effortless, and it makes the transitions between storytelling and music feel completely natural.
It is sprawling and I think the sprawl is part of the point.
Because adolescence is sprawling. First love is sprawling. Memory is sprawling. We don’t experience the past in tidy chronological order; we experience it as fragments, songs, images, embarrassments, obsessions and moments that suddenly come rushing back with extraordinary force.
Brine understands that.
And what could be more unlikely – or more completely right – than putting Anne Frank, Neutral Milk Hotel and the sexual confusion of adolescence in the same room?
The remarkable thing is that this isn’t ultimately a show about either Anne Frank or Neutral Milk Hotel. They become the raw material for something much more personal: an exploration of what it means to discover desire, to fall in love for the first time, to be overwhelmed by another person and to realise, perhaps for the first time, that your own life is going to be full of stories.
There is something profoundly generous about Brine’s work. He takes the strange, embarrassing, horny, heartbreaking, ridiculous fragments of being human and says: look, this is worth making theatre about.
And for ninety minutes, it is.
Seeing Salty Brine makes life liveable.
Kate Gaul, Theatre Now
