10 August 2025
This is the kind of show you dream of discovering at the Fringe – then immediately want to run out and tell everyone about it. It’s true there are diamonds to be found here among the sea of paste and mediocrity – there are after all 3,900 shows performing in Edinburgh in just 4 weeks – but Del Valle, a gripping slice of Americana from the underbelly of life, is a thing of rare beauty and deserves nothing but full houses.
After an announcement of a slew of outrageous trigger warnings, Ned Van Zandt strides onto a stage empty apart from two chairs and a hat stand from where he takes a Stetson and places it on his head. Physically he’s short and stocky, looking more like a trainer who should be in the boxing ring giving encouragement to a fighter than a celebrated thespian. But boy can he tell a story and morph in seconds into a kakeidoscope of low lifes and deadbeats who would not be out of place in an episode of Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul.
And we’re off… straight into his time helping out at a rural meth lab and as a drug runner, an episode that will lead him straight to jail when he can’t raise $20,000 bail. There he has to fall on the mercy of an Ayrian kingpin – “he had the whitest skin I’ve ever seen, covered in crosses and swastika tattoos and a huge dick”. Van Zandt is reduced to giving this guy blow jobs – which he actually likes – in return for opioid painkillers and protection, and teaching him how to act ready for his release in 2 years when he hopes to get a job in TV.
Del Valle: A True Tale of Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll… and Redemption packs a helluva lot into 60 minutes – his addiction to heroin, cruising queer bath houses, failed auditions for the likes of Happy Days, outrageous claims of celebrity shags, his survival in the state penitentary, rehab (who knew you get two rehabs per lifetime of cover from American Actors Equity?) and ultimately, redemption.
It switches locations in a blink of the eye from the drug-induced chaos of New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel in the 1970s – where is shot up heroin with punk rocker Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, and Chaka Khan in the notorious room 100 – to the fluorescent glare of that Texan correctional facility.
Del Valle is a genre-bending piece of dark comedy storytelling unlike anything you’ve probably seen before. If it’s all true, as he claims, it truly incredible. I’m not sure people would actually believe the twists and turns it if it was turned into a Netflix series. But it really should be.
He’s an actor who shared a Broadway stage with Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh (“but that’s another story”) and appeared on film with Jane Fonda (the Vietnam drama Coming Home), Gregory Peck (his favourite actor) and even played Rudolph Giuliani in the opioid series Painkiller. Here he proves to be an unmissable, one-man theatrical hurricane, a chameleon actor who can transform from one character to another in an instant. It’s an acting masterclass – a heartstoppping tour-de-force.I laughed so much and could have sat there all day listening to him and his story. Now what’s the scoop on Kevin Spacey?…
My advice? Run don’t walk to see this theatrical masterpiece before it sells out.
