The stage is transformed into a replica of a child’s cozy bedroom. Toys are haphazardly strewn across the carpet, picture books are left open, forgotten, and a wicker laundry basket brims with little jumpers and socks.
This setting could easily belong to any young family, serving as the seemingly ideal backdrop for a one-woman show that promises to offer an intimate glimpse into the world of motherhood.
Although the child, a four-year-old as the audience comes to know, remains unseen, her charmingly high-pitched voice occasionally fills the theatre, emanating from speakers during the hour-long performance.
She wonders aloud why her Elsa dress no longer fits, questions why her baby brother bit her, and sweetly asks if spaghetti can be on the menu for dinner.
To this final query, the performer, a 39-year-old brunette, seems ready with a response.
‘No can do, kiddo,’ she replies. ‘Mama has post-traumatic spaghetti disorder.’
It is a line that prompts laughter from the show’s small audience.
Then again, as Amanda Knox declared ahead of the Edinburgh Fringe premiere of her stand-up show Cartwheel, the production is intended largely as a comedy. ‘It’s 70 per cent comedy, 30 per cent rage,’ she told one interviewer. That’s one way of describing it.
Amanda Knox arrives at her court hearing in Perugia in September 2008. Knox was twice acquitted and twice convicted for murdering Meredith Kercher
Knox in her Edinburgh Fringe stand-up show Cartwheel which she has billed as her ’70 per cent comedy, 30 per cent rage’
For one family there is little to laugh about, which is why their description is rather different. ‘A deplorable offence to Meredith’s memory,’ is how the Kercher family lawyer Francesco Maresca put it.
For the Meredith in question is Meredith Kercher, the 21-year-old British student who was murdered in the Italian city of Perugia in November 2007 – and whom Knox, her former roommate, was twice convicted and twice acquitted of killing.
From the moment it emerged earlier this year that Knox intended to stage a production about her wrongful imprisonment, Meredith’s family have expressed despair that she appears unable to understand the continuing pain such public retellings inflict.
‘Imagine 20 years after Meredith’s death, your pain is turned into someone else’s laughter,’ as Meredith’s sister Stephanie put it this week, appealing for Knox to pull the plug on her production.
Those appeals appear to have fallen on deaf ears. The production made its debut at the Fringe – where Knox also features on the cover of The List, the festival’s 2026 magazine – beginning a sell-out, week-long run that has only deepened the anguish of Stephanie and her brothers Lyle and John, now the family’s surviving members following the deaths of their parents John and Arline in 2020.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stephanie, 43, said: ‘She has had free speech to tell her story over the past decade or so, with minimal comments from us, despite the ever enduring pain. I am sure we do not need any more material from her side and do not understand why our feelings on this couldn’t be considered.’
Such is the family’s continuing distress that family friend Sally Alington has launched a petition calling for the venue to cancel the show. At the time of writing it had more than 9,000 signatures.
‘This show not only disrespects Meredith’s memory but risks normalising violence by making light of such a harrowing event,’ the petition, launched via the website Change.org, claims.
Pictured: Meredith Kercher the 21-year-old British student murdered in Perugia in November 2007
A poster at Edinburgh Fringe for Knox’s show. Meredith’s family have expressed despair that Knox appears unable to understand the continuing pain such public retellings of the case inflict
The family’s anger has been further fuelled by mother-of-two Knox’s claim, made in an interview while promoting the production this week, that Meredith herself would have found it ‘funny’.
‘Meredith was really sophisticated and smart but she was also fun… I think that she would appreciate the show, because it grapples with what it means to be a young woman, and it’s honest,’ she insisted.
It is a suggestion to which Stephanie has a robust rebuttal. ‘She absolutely would not find comedy surrounding these issues funny,’ she responded, adding that she ‘could not fathom how rape and murder can be laughed about’.
To understand why the Kerchers regard the production as such a profound betrayal is to return to the extraordinary case that imprinted itself on the public consciousness and has overshadowed their family for two decades.
On November 1, 2007, Meredith, an exchange student from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found half-clothed, raped and murdered in the bedroom of the cottage she shared with Knox and two other young women in the university city of Perugia.
Within days, attention had shifted to Knox herself, a fresh-faced American student from Seattle who, until then, had been living an otherwise unremarkable year abroad. Almost overnight, Foxy Knoxy – a nickname first coined years earlier – was transformed from an unknown student into one of the most recognisable women in the world.
Her apparently bizarre response to the brutal death of a housemate did not help. Indeed, Cartwheel, the title of her show, is derived from what Knox insists is one of the enduring myths surrounding the investigation – namely, that she performed cartwheels at the police station shortly after Meredith’s death.
She has since explained they were yoga stretches, yet she makes a point of cartwheeling off stage at the end of her show.
Pictured: Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast-born drifter with a history of burglaries who was later convicted of Meredith’s murder and served 13 years of a 16-year sentence
Knox who was known as Foxy Knoxy – a nickname first coined years earlier – was transformed from an unknown student into one of the most recognisable women in the world following the notorious case
Forensic evidence ultimately pointed to Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast-born drifter with a history of burglaries who – after fleeing the country – was later convicted of Meredith’s murder and served 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
Before that, Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested, detained and, in 2009, convicted of Meredith’s sexual assault and murder. In 2011, they were acquitted, allowing Knox to return to Seattle.
However, Italy’s justice system permitted further appeals. In 2014 the pair were reconvicted, leaving Knox facing the prospect of extradition once more until, in 2015, Italy’s highest court finally cleared both defendants, ruling there was no evidence that they had participated in Meredith’s murder.
She does, however, have a criminal conviction for slander after wrongly accusing a Congolese man, Patrick Lumumba, of Meredith’s murder, although it was ruled that her three-year sentence had been served because of her four years already behind bars. Although Knox said she wanted only to be ‘an anonymous college student’ after returning to the US, she has never entirely retreated from public life – initially, she insists, because she felt compelled to reclaim a story that others had written for her.
‘People were authoring my experience and imposing their story on my reality,’ she told one interviewer. ‘So that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s exhausting having to explain yourself over and over again.’ However, she has also rarely stopped trying, earning a lot of money along the way.
There have been not one but two memoirs. The first, Waiting To Be Heard, published in 2013, chronicled her wrongful conviction and four years in prison and earned her a £3 million advance. It was followed by last year’s Free: My Search For Meaning, exploring the years that came afterwards.
Then there are the TV series. In 2016 Knox cooperated with an eponymous Netflix documentary, and in 2025 was executive producer of Hulu mini-series The Twisted Tale Of Amanda Knox.
She has since hosted two podcasts – Hard Knox, in which she interviews people who say they have been wrongfully convicted, and Doubt, where she has discussed controversial criminal cases, including that of Lucy Letby.
Meredith Kercher (right) with her sister Stephanie at her graduation day in Portsmouth
She has also become a regular keynote speaker for the Innocence Network, an international coalition dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, frequently arguing that her own experience exposes wider failings within criminal justice systems.
Of course, few people can claim to understand the consequences of a wrongful conviction more intimately than Knox. Yet nearly 20 years after the events in Perugia, with her 40th birthday approaching and now a mother of two, she seems increasingly reluctant to step away from the story that made her infamous. If anything she has ramped up her efforts.
Last year’s Hulu mini-series was followed earlier this year with Mouth Of The Wolf, a documentary Knox co-produced with her husband, the novelist Christopher Robinson, in which she traced her decision to return to Italy for the first time since her conviction and her confrontation with Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who led the case against her.
In April, she flew to the UK to host two screenings and question-and-answer sessions at a south London cinema, attracting an audience of lawyers, campaigners and true-crime enthusiasts, although in the event a technicality (the film had not been given an age classification, required under British law) meant the screening itself could not go ahead.
Then there’s Cartwheel. The show made its debut last month on Vashon Island – a picturesque and bohemian community of around 10,000, a short ferry ride from Seattle – which Knox and her husband now call home.
The pair met at a book launch in 2015 before marrying three years later. It is on Vashon that Knox and Robinson are raising their children, a now four-year-old daughter, Eureka Muse, born in 2021 (and whose voice the audience hears in Cartwheel) and two-year-old son Echo.
Family photographs posted online – with the faces of both children carefully concealed – show beach walks and woodland adventures, while Knox has spoken of cherishing the community feel of the island and life away from the international spotlight.
Last year Hulu released a TV drama about Knox’s case
And it was here that Knox chose to first showcase Cartwheel at the end of last month in front of an audience of around 30 at the island’s Black Cat Cabaret, an intimate venue usually better known for burlesque nights, belly dancing and experimental music.
On paper, its premise sounded deceptively light-hearted.
The promotional material described it as a ‘solo comedy and storytelling performance’ by a woman ‘approaching forty’, ‘juggling motherhood’ and ‘finally getting around to being furious’.
The fury, it added, stemmed from ‘the whole wrongful imprisonment thing’ – ‘especially when half the world is telling her to get over it while the other half still thinks she’s guilty’.
One person who attended later described how Knox talked of the ‘guilty look’ people get when they recognise her in public, or the doctor who read her medical chart aloud and said, ‘too bad that other one ruined your name’ – not realising she was Amanda Knox herself.
None of this seems to have dismayed theatregoers, with those who attended saying the performance was warmly received, as it was at a subsequent performance last week in the West Coast city of Tacoma.
‘There was a standing ovation and a lot of applause,’ Chris Serface, managing artistic director of Tacoma Little Theatre, told the Daily Mail this week, describing audiences as ‘enraptured’. ‘She came out to take a final bow.’
Mr Serface believes the production could have a life well beyond Edinburgh. ‘A group of people I was talking to afterwards said if she takes it on the road and tours it, it could easily be a Netflix hour-long special, a stand-up comedy routine,’ he says.
Knox is escorted out court in December 2009. In the years since her wrongful Knox, has written two memoirs and hosted two poscasts
Seattle theatre critic Greg Heilman reached a similar conclusion, praising Knox’s stage presence and dry wit.
‘She has spent so much time since her 20s with her books and a mini-series… the story is so well polished in her mind,’ he observed. ‘I think this is just another medium, and another way for her to present it.’
While her supporters would argue she is simply continuing to reclaim a narrative that was once written for her, for Meredith Kercher’s family – who have largely maintained a dignified silence in the years since Meredith’s murder – it represents a further mining, not to mention monetisation, of what Stephanie referred to this week as ‘the family’s immense pain’.
‘This is a strong word to use but it almost feels like trolling,’ family friend Sally Alington told the Daily Mail.
‘This country is the home of the surviving members of the Kerchers. To bring it here feels like rubbing it in their faces.’
Not least because the family pain has been compounded by further devastating loss after both Kercher parents died within four months of one another in 2020.
John, 77, died after suffering severe injuries in a suspected hit-and-run near his Croydon home in January 2020, while just weeks later during the first wave of the Covid pandemic, his wife, Arline, died in hospital from health complications.
It is perhaps scant consolation to their surviving children that neither parent lived to see the day their daughter’s murder became the subject of entertainment.
Not that long ago, Knox herself insisted she would rather not still be telling this story, suggesting in a 2021 interview with The New York Times that financial necessity had left her little choice.
‘What I keep telling Chris is that I want to get to a place where I don’t have to keep living the worst experience of my life so that we can pay the mortgage,’ she proclaimed.
Perhaps that day will come -although judging by Knox’s reaction to criticism this week, there’s little sign of it arriving soon.
On Thursday, when news of the petition launched, she hit back on Instagram, insisting that it contained ‘many false assumptions and completely mischaracterises the show’.
‘Cartwheel honours Meredith Kercher’s memory and calls out the violence that was done to her and to me,’ she added.
The statement – which brazenly compares the harm to her reputation with that of Meredith’s rape and murder – is one to which Sally Alington can only react with bewilderment.
‘She says she’s doing it in Meredith’s honour,’ Sally observes. ‘But she never asked.’
