Hannah Maxwell greets us individually by name as we enter with a clipboard, name tags, and directing us to find a spot for our bags. The setting is a stark whiteboard-and-post-it-notes environment in the Hetzel Room at the State Library, evocative of a team building exercise, poorly organised creative workshop, or management consultancy program. The isolation is palpable with Maxwell as the sole performer – except for two well-dressed teddy bear gentlemen; one sitting imposingly onstage, and the other over our shoulders behind the tech desk.

We are here to workshop Maxwell’s next Fringe show, and each show idea has, ironically, an interesting enough premise to easily sustain a Fringe hour. One is the “Dead Dad” show (a popular Fringe trope), but unfortunately, Maxwell advises us, their dad isn’t dead, but did perform a charming ventriloquist one-man show about telemarketing in the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe, which Maxwell re-enacts. There’s also the “Love” show, where they expose their gut-wrenching #trauma about one of many cursed queer festival romances; trouble is, Maxwell has gone through lots of therapy to manage this #trauma, and doesn’t much feel like recounting this unpleasant story every night, thank you very much. The final prospective show is titled “TURN YOUR FUCKING PHONES OFF”, where Maxwell depicts an intriguing period in her life when they were working for a “counter-disinformation campaign” for a certain unnamed UK government agency. Regrettably, they have signed the Official Secrets Act, and are not sure which details they would be allowed to share.

Throughout the hour Maxwell has a wicked charm that keeps us enraptured but increasingly anxious. Though you’re putty in their hands when they encourage your contributions to their concepts, there’s a subterranean danger that comes with their calm demeanour. The starkness of the setting only enhances this, with the evocative lighting, sound, and music automated and solely controlled by Maxwell with their presentation clicker.

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It is as if we are invited into Maxwell’s ruthless creator’s subconscious, flitting between ideas that might be more commercially viable and others that will be artistically satisfying but too niche to attract an audience or festival awards. Anyone who has ever grappled with being unsatisfied with their creative imagination will feel much sympathy.

As Maxwell seeks the perfect Fringe show, they are open with the precarity of their personal finances and the exasperation that they “thought [this] would get easier the more (they) did it”. This niggling inadequacy with which they view each perfectly serviceable show concept becomes a profound illustration of the economic vampirism of arts festival programming.

Everyone from the PR companies to venue owners to the festivals themselves take their satisfactory clip of your ticket sales, and the artist is expected to bite their lip and be thankful for the opportunity to do what they love.

Even their brush with fame — when Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) was one of only two audience members in her Fringe show Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi — is tinged with the bemusement of how the media hype Maxwell received was unrelated to the content or quality of their show. It was also the only time their literary agent ever came knocking, with the ego-shattering question: “Well done darling. Remind me: Do we represent you?”

Though we’re invited to provide input on Maxwell’s concepts throughout, ultimately – in an arresting, unscripted conclusion – Maxwell leaves their email address on the whiteboard, and walks out unsatisfied with the meta-theatrical exercise. Nothing could be more descriptive, with the world in turmoil, universities nixing the Humanities, and AI companies finding new ways to render artists irrelevant, of the crisis of artlessness we face today.

BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG is an uncomfortably familiar expression of burnout and despair to anyone who has presented something in the festival circuit. Whilst it may not give us a rising sense of hope, or an empowering monologue set to swelling music at the end, it might force us to ask the right questions about why we do all this.

BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG is playing at the Hetzel Room at the Courtyard of Curiosities at 4:30pm on Saturday March 14 and Sunday March 15