From the première Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, 9 August 2026. Running time: 60 minutes.

You’ll hear that Amanda Knox’s Cartwheel is funny. It is. Very funny. Knox jokes, sings, opines, emotes, and commands a stage. She even does cartwheels for us.

But that’s almost beside the point. Cartwheel is also deep, ironic, exasperating, raw, fearful, angry, and moving.

The stage is a child’s living space, bursting with colour. Toys are everywhere, along with clothes and other things waiting to be sorted and folded; waiting to be seen. Knox herself is colourful. Stage right, a table serves as her home base, from which she ventures into the clutter around her. Childhood isn’t merely something Cartwheel talks about; visually, Knox has placed herself back inside it.

At one point she surveys the disorder and says, ‘Sorry, it looks like a crime scene here.’

It’s a great joke. It’s also Cartwheel in miniature: take something innocent, change the context, and its meaning changes with it.

By now, Knox has told stories — her own and other people’s — in many forms: in her memoirs Waiting to Be Heard and Free; in The Truth About True Crime, her five-season SundanceTV podcast and eight-part true-crime series; in The Scarlet Letter Reports, her series of conversations with women publicly sexualised, scrutinised and demonised; and in Labyrinths, the podcast she created with her husband, Christopher Robinson. Most recently, she has helped tell her own story again as a writer and executive producer of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, produced with Monica Lewinsky and others.

Cartwheel is different. There is no interviewer, no co-host, no screen separating her from us. Amanda is alone onstage, revisiting a life that much of the world still believes it has the right to interpret for her.

Onstage, Knox communicates something harder to pull off: toughness and vulnerability simultaneously. The toughness has earned its spot. She has survived interrogation, prosecution, imprisonment, vilification, and two decades of having strangers pontificate about who she is. But she doesn’t hide behind that toughness. She shows us the vulnerability that survived all of it, too. That tension gives Cartwheel much of its emotional power.

And the audience was with her. The Edinburgh run was sold out. On Sunday night the crowd responded enthusiastically throughout. There was plenty of laughing, but also those audible reactions that tell you something she shared has suddenly landed: an ‘oh’, a buzz, the sound of people getting it. When she finished, the full house let her know what it thought. The clapping was instant and sustained.

That matters because Cartwheel deeply explores innocence in all its forms and with what happens when others get to decide what innocence looks like.

Knox is acutely aware of broken dreams, or dreams that came perilously close to being broken: her mother’s, her own. As someone who has spent nearly two decades being treated by much of the world as though she were guilty, she is acutely aware of innocence lost, revisited and threatened — and of how readily it can be twisted into evidence of something else.

One of the show’s sharpest ironies comes from before any of us knew her name. At 17, shortly before leaving for Italy, Knox received a ‘Spirit of Freedom Award’, an award invented specifically for her. In retrospect, the universe may have been laying it on a little thick.

Then came Perugia. Meredith Kercher’s murder. And the extraordinary consequences of being young, unconventional, spontaneous, and conspicuously free. It’s mostly not funny how that freedom became ‘evidence’ against her. But some of it is so odd you just have to laugh.

And yes, Knox may sometimes have acted weird. She was a young woman responding to an almost incomprehensible situation in ways that other people judged odd.

But weird is not guilty. Fortunately for most of us, weird is not a criminal offence.

A cartwheel, a kiss, an odd reaction: enormous interpretive weight was placed on Knox’s behaviour. Knox acted in ways people decided looked guilty. Rudy Guede, meanwhile, left evidence of guilt and was convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder. Yet it was Amanda’s behaviour the world couldn’t stop looking at.

Which makes it wonderfully strange to sit in a theatre nearly twenty years later and watch her do another cartwheel. Once, people watched Amanda Knox doing ordinary things and interpreted them as evidence. And even the original ‘cartwheel’ appears to have been fake news.

Now she’s a performer, and watching her is literally what we’ve come to do.

The invitation is to look again.

The cartwheel hasn’t changed. The interpretation has.

Knox herself supplies an even better metaphor. At one point she compares herself to the dress, the famous image that some people see as white and gold and others as blue and black. Same object. Same evidence. Radically different perceptions, each accompanied by absolute certainty.

It’s funny. It’s also an awfully good metaphor for being Amanda Knox. Except nobody went to prison over the dress.

Call it perceptual constructivism with terrifying consequences. We don’t simply see what is there; we construct what we see. Usually that’s an interesting fact about perception. It becomes something else entirely when what other people are constructing is you.

The world didn’t merely look at Amanda Knox. It constructed ‘Amanda Knox’. And then treated the construction as evidence.

Guilt runs through Cartwheel, too, but Knox’s guilt is not the guilt the world once assigned to her. It is survivor guilt. Meredith died; Amanda didn’t. It could have been Amanda. More painfully, Knox contrasts herself with her scrupulously careful roommate and wrestles with the terrible thought that perhaps it should have been her.

It is an awful inversion: a woman once burdened with guilt for Meredith’s murder now carries guilt for having survived it. Alongside that misplaced guilt sits Guede’s actual guilt, which has suffered the peculiar disadvantage of being supported by evidence.

And then there is anger. For years, Knox had powerful reasons to control it. Anger from a woman accused of murder could itself become another facial expression, another gesture, another piece of behaviour to interpret. Her anger and frustration, so long constrained because they needed to be, finally find a home in this one-woman show. And somehow they become funny.

There is a line, often attributed to Voltaire, that God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. Cartwheel seems to offer Amanda Knox’s retort: ‘laugh anyway, even while you’re scared’.

Not gone are the fear, anger and trauma, and the people waiting to interpret whatever she does next. Knox laughs in their presence, not after their disappearance. The comedy isn’t an escape from the darker material; it’s one way she confronts it.

If you have empathy for Knox, something else happens. Her trauma doesn’t remain safely onstage as something that happened to somebody else. She brings you uncomfortably close to the bewilderment, rage, nonsense, and helplessness of watching innocence turned into evidence of guilt.

The emotional centre of Cartwheel, for me, comes when Knox returns to childhood and then looks forward to her own daughter.

Her mother once watched a daughter leave home full of freedom and possibility, only to see that freedom twisted against her. Now Amanda is the mother. And she realises something devastating: her daughter is closer in age to the Amanda who arrived in Perugia than Amanda herself is.

What Knox revisits isn’t merely her own childhood any more. She sees its fragility in her daughter. And with that comes a particularly parental terror: knowing how innocent a child really can be while knowing, from experience, how readily the world can misunderstand and appropriate that innocence.

Knox is trying to prevent what happened to her from becoming an inheritance. Her mother previously fought to protect Amanda from the saga; Amanda is now fighting to protect her daughter from Amanda’s saga.

For years, attempts to silence Knox have often come wrapped in an appeal to the victim: Think of Meredith. How dare Amanda keep talking when Meredith is dead?

But compassion is not a finite resource. Meredith Kercher’s murder was horrific. Remembering her does not require Amanda Knox to disappear.

And now there is another innocent person in the story: Amanda’s daughter.

What about her?

Knox is a mother trying to protect a child who had nothing to do with the murder, investigation, prosecution, tabloids or mythology that followed. Yet that mythology can reach her anyway.

Here Cartwheel approaches perhaps its darkest irony. Amanda Knox is not a murderer. Yet when she contemplates the possibility of this saga reaching her daughter, there is a distinctly maternal flash of: If you harm my child, then …

She doesn’t finish the thought. She doesn’t need to. The woman falsely imagined as a murderer confronts the one thing capable of provoking a primal rage almost any parent can understand: a threat to her child.

There are generations of innocence here. And generations of irony.

There is also somewhere Cartwheel conspicuously doesn’t go. Members of Meredith Kercher’s family have continued to express doubts about Knox’s innocence and frustration with the attention she receives. Their grief is unimaginable, and their desire that Meredith be remembered is completely understandable.

But grief doesn’t make every conclusion drawn from it correct.

Knox was definitively acquitted of Kercher’s murder. Yet suspicion has proved resistant to evidence. Knox could direct considerable anger towards the Kercher family. She doesn’t. When the show approaches Meredith and her family, what comes through instead is compassion and sadness.

Meredith Kercher was murdered. Amanda Knox was innocent. These are not competing truths.

Something else becomes apparent during Cartwheel, and afterwards. Knox wants us to know her, but she also seems genuinely interested in knowing us. During the performance she reaches outwards. Afterwards, she eagerly meets people who have shown up, talks with them and listens.

That matters in a show about being seen and mis-seen. Millions of strangers have believed they knew Amanda Knox without knowing her at all. Here she wants to be known rather than merely looked at. And she wants the encounter to run in both directions.

Her saga inevitably brings people to her work. But somewhere along the way comes an epiphany: the murder may be what brought you to Amanda Knox, but Amanda Knox is no longer interesting merely because of the murder.

The saga gave her an audience while simultaneously obscuring the person that audience might actually want to hear from.

There may well come a time when people know Amanda Knox primarily for this growing body of work while only vaguely remembering why the name became famous in the first place.

I hope so.

Remembering Meredith does not require Amanda to remain trapped in the story that began in Perugia. Meredith was robbed of her future by her murderer. Amanda was not responsible for that crime and should not be required to surrender her own future as a perpetual act of mourning for it. The point is not to forget the origin story, but to transcend it.

Amanda Knox is alive. She gets to have a life, and she gets to talk about what happened to it. She also gets to become more than what happened to her: wife, mother, writer, podcaster, advocate, and, now, comedienne. I’m waiting for the superhero action figure. Perugia is part of Amanda Knox’s story. It does not get to be the whole story.

For nearly twenty years, others have been constructing Amanda Knox. In Cartwheel, she takes back the right to construct what comes next.

★★★★★

★★★★★ Amanda Knox: Cartwheel was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.