5th August 2024
Edinburgh
THE
PRESS sniffily dismissed, essentially, as ‘unoriginal’. I should’ve said something smart and witty in response, but I was honestly so hungover I just tried not to cry or be sick.
Edinburgh has a rich history of death. It is an extremely haunted city. If you go up to any of the locals during the Fringe and ask them about hauntings, 9 times out of 10 the person you’re speaking to will be a ghost. The Fringe itself is also haunted. By the ghosts of dead dads. And, more annoyingly for me, by the ghosts of dead dad shows. The dead dad comedy show has become a cliché in the annals of Fringe history, and that presents a real problem for me, a comedian with an Edinburgh Fringe show and a dead dad. I did my best to keep him out of it. But what started off as a show about work became a show about life and death and life after death and at that point it became harder and harder not to mention the skeleton of an elephant in the room. His death is not what the show is about, but it seemed wrong to not even mention it. Turns out, though, that even acknowledging the death of your father is enough for some people to categorise you as ‘one of those shows’. After a preview in London (at which I was astonishingly hungover) a comic I’d never met before said, ‘another dead dad show I see’. Another dead dad show. It hurt to hear one of the biggest things that’s happened in my life
But then again, the fact that it’s not original is a pretty good reason to talk about it. When my dad died, I was shocked to discover I was not, in fact, the first person in history this had ever happened to. Dads had died before. Quite a lot of them. And I desperately wanted to hear from the others. To then discover that some of those people had turned that experience into a full hour of comedy? Let me at it! I’ll see any dead dad show I can. If you’ve got a dead dad, I’m coming to your show. Same goes for mums. Don’t think you’re safe just ‘cause you’ve got a dead mum. I don’t really care who died, to be quite honest, if you’ve got some grief to get off your chest you can guarantee I’ll be sat somewhere in the dark audience lapping it up like a thirsty little grief dog. So don’t be alarmed if you hear slurping. And, if you’ve ever found yourself rolling your eyes and thinking ‘another dead dad show’, then get those eyes back down to their normal position, please. Don’t go eye-rolling at grief. If you really want to put an end to dead dad shows, then you should focus your efforts on finding out what’s killing all these dads and putting a stop to it. I think it’s probably a werewolf. Rich Spalding: Gather Your Skeletons Pleasance Courtyard - Cellar
company ‘Floating Shed’ and in collaboration with Palestinian theatre maker Tarik Badwan as an Israeli-Palestinian co-creation. We want to give our audience a glimpse into a reality they see so much about in the news, especially this last year. The story deals with themes like toxic masculinity in the armed forces, protest against war, self-harm and how occupation can manifest itself in an ArabIsraeli body. Essentially, it explores the different attitudes around conscription in Israel and is about four friends who want to live peacefully in an impossible violent reality. The different attitudes around conscription that we’re exploring have been directly informed by the real experiences of myself and my friends growing up in Tel-Aviv. When I started writing the play (six years ago) I immediately saw how the complexity of life in Israel could be portrayed through the relationships the characters have with one another. That’s why those experiences fitted a theatrical space so well – the drama and conflict between those young men and the complex circumstances around them are dramatic in essence. Nadav Burstein
Rebels & Patriots started as diary entries I scribbled during my time in the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). It’s based on mine and my closest friends’ experiences in mandatory army conscription. I’m developing it with my theatre
Ultimately, all the characters in it want to live peacefully in a safe home and are pursuing what is a political truth to them. The core of their individual struggles, and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole, stems around the notion of what safety is and what people are willing to sacrifice in order to defend it as a truth. The play is called Rebels & Patriots and I think that the name encapsulates the essence of the piece; Israeli society is a deeply pained one, and the history of the region is one
of constant war. When the characters talk of their different perspectives around the IsraeliPalestinian conflict they really show that they’re neither rebels nor patriots; they’re young people in an impossible reality. Our cast is made from Jewish, Israeli, British and Palestinian creatives, and this constellation means that we sometimes face difficult political conversations in the rehearsal room. We make sure that we are honest in our discussions to venture to find out how complicated the things we’re discussing really are. That’s the core of the work and our creative relationship’s importance. Those tough debates are what we need more of in society. We must remember that although we might not always agree with one another, we must always hear each other’s perspectives and acknowledge each other’s humanity. That is the only way to move towards any kind of political resolution. Ultimately, our play offers no solution to the war in Israel-Palestine, and we’re not pretending to have any answers. What we do have are questions, and we would like to share them with as many people as we can.
Rebels and Patriots Pleasance Courtyard - Upstairs
Coin Toss Collective, a non-hierarchical, seven-strong theatre ensemble from Bristol, are bringing Sit-Up Awards finalist FREAK OUT! to the Pleasance for its first-ever Fringe. But the long road to Edinburgh over the past two years hasn’t been without its fair share of chaos. SOPHIA: Cake. Who doesn’t like cake? I’ll tell you who: the entire audience at the VAULT Festival. We sourced a mouth-watering cake for our first night to distribute to audience members. To my surprise, every member of the audience politely yet firmly declined. We couldn’t understand why no one wanted a slice. As it turns out, Sol, who, in a previous scene, cuts the first slice and uses it to demonstrate the process of coastal erosion, couldn’t find a knife. So he used his bare hands to get it.
difficult, complex stories feel immediate, accessible, funny, human and engaging - and intimately connected to their lives.
Hollace Starr As wildfires rage and the ice caps melt, many theatre-makers question how to respond to the climate crisis. There’s a fear that the issue is too big, too remote, it will scare audiences away. Pepperdine Scotland and playwright Lewis Hetherington hope to break through with a production using compelling human stories to explore the greatest catastrophe of our era. no one is coming to save us, a US-Scottish collaboration, is informed by the lived experience of its cast, from burning forests to mega-storms. This is the generation of young people growing up amidst an everaccelerating and worsening cycle of extreme weather events. For Josh Wilson it was a terrifying wildfire that threatened his town and destroyed the flora and fauna across an entire mountain. Zoe O’Donnell endured the great freeze that paralysed a large chunk of Texas. Gabby Montejo survived a near-unprecedented typhoon which devastated her home town in the Philippines. Alex Negrila witnessed how sea temperature rises have devastated the once-vast ancient coral beds in the seas off the Dominican Republic. Theatre is the perfect arena for asking questions and raising challenges about the issues that beset society. It lets us face our humanity, in all its messy, overwhelming and beautiful glory. And we believe it’s the job of theatremakers to create work which makes
What we aren’t doing is offering up easy answers. There are none, and that’s one of the fundamental problems we address. For example, how far can legitimate protest go when those in power refuse to act, or are complicit in the destruction? You sign a petition, make a placard, go on a march. Nothing changes. You throw some paint, chain yourself to railings, scale skyscrapers to unveil banners. Nothing changes. What next? With so much at stake, where are the red lines? And all the while the consequences grow and the destruction deepens. These are exactly the kind of pressing concerns that are at the heart of the Pepperdine Scotland initiative. For those who have not come across it before, it brings together students from the theatre department of California’s Pepperdine University with Scottish playwrights and creatives to develop new work which is performed every two years at the Fringe. It has an excellent track record, including two Fringe Firsts and other awards, for a series of productions which have explored themes from sexual violence to the rise of the alt right. Lewis Hetherington’s deeply collaborative approach to theatre making perfectly suits its aims and objectives. And with no one is coming to save us we believe we are offering audiences a timely and inspirational production that is both human and humane. It’s about more than crisis, it’s about hope and the realisation that when others will not act, then the responsibility for change falls to us. The dilemma, though, is how far you can, or maybe should, be prepared to go. no one is coming to save us Pleasance Courtyard - Beside
WERONIKA: Lobster cage. We sourced our VAULT Festival set from various theatre-makers & got a lot of cool stuff -hurricane lanterns, vintage life ring, miniature boats and an actual lobster cage! When we heard that a friend of a friend was travelling in a van to Bristol after our last show and could take it all with him, we were relieved. I volunteered to go with the set and, without realising, embarked on an odyssey through England with a group of chain-smoking builders, none of which spoke English (...but I did talk to their families via FaceTime), as we stopped in various locations around the country, delivering furniture for 10 hours. CLAUDIA: Gigantic Tote Bags. In January, I was redesigning our set to ensure it was suitable for touring. I made our set pieces (cliffs and houses) flat-packed so we could carry those ourselves. Working alongside the prop maker Jessica Jones, we used recyclable, repurposed, or biodegradable materials. Our set is made of cardboard, so we were concerned about it getting wet. Luckily, Jess found this biodegradable AND waterproof fabric to make into large tote bags to carry our set in. Unfortunately, she soon began having difficulty sewing the bags as the material wasn’t responding well to the sewing machine… After a quick Google search, we realised that the material is primarily used for BODY BAGS. Yes, that’s right… body bags for human corpses. So, to anyone planning an eco-burial, I can give you a good rec! BEN: Houses and cliffs. Carrying huge tote bags of cardboard is scarier than it seems! On our way from Bristol to CPT, we faced heavy winds that would throw us off course and narrow pathways that could damage the set. It felt like some foul forces were trying to stop us, but we persisted! After taking nearly every form of public transport, we arrived. CPT was waiting for us with a slight look of surprise to see three bags full of Portsford. ALYSSA: Jug. We pour water over the stage from a jug at the show’s climax. As we accidentally knocked the jug over at the show’s beginning at CPT, the only other option was a massive water container. It would have been a great save if this wasn’t our first night with chorror, silently praying our town of Portsford would withstand the flood! Many people told us afterwards how impressed they were with the visual image of the water seeping under the cliffs - what they don’t know is that they were the only ones to (hopefully) ever see it. SOL: Water containers. There’s a scene where Rosie and I take turns dunking our heads in water containers and holding our breath. In one CPT performance, when my head hit the water, I felt myself going into a cold water shock - the water was unexpectedly freezing. I was completely dizzy and disorientated for the rest of the play, and my heart raced. I stumbled across the stage and knocked into much of the set. Since then, we have ensured our water is always at room temperature! ROSIE: Sandcastles. During our show, we invite audience members to build and decorate sandcastles on stage, which gives us plenty of funny anecdotes. One night, we had a school group from Boston, USA. Boston students were very keen to build sandcastles and had lots to say about their sandcastle designs. They almost made our show overrun! Freak Out! Pleasance Dome - Jack Dome
Bi-Curious George Earlier this year, scientists published the first ever footage of humpback whales mating in the wild and to (almost) everyone’s surprise, they were both male! Scientists started scrambling round for explanations; why would this be happening? Don’t they know they can’t reproduce that way?? Considering that the first recorded instance of animal homosexuality was in 384BC when Aristotle observed it in pigeons, partridges and quails, you’d have thought we might be used to the idea by now. But no, every instance of queerness amongst animals is desperately explained away, and the explanations are genuinely laughable the same ones I told myself as a closeted queer teenager at a girls’ school: “we’re just doing this for the boys’ attention” “we’re just practising for the real thing.” If this is your first encounter with queer animals, welcome. Let’s dive in with a few of my favourite factoids for you to bring out at your next awkward family event: The genuine scientific term for a dolphin orgy is a wuzzle. Isn’t that wonderful?
Clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites when the female leader dies, the largest male will biologically transition into a female. The physical transition takes longer than the social one, suggesting that clownfish have a concept of gender separate to biological sex. Every Spring in Canada, a group of over 100 Red Garter Snakes have an orgy. Over half of the sex that happens between giraffes is homosexual. As of January 19th 2022, 100% of the recorded intercourse between humpback whales is homosexual. Conversations around identity, and especially queerness and trans-ness, have become so vicious in recent years. I made Queer Planet because I wanted to talk about being queer in a joyful uplifting way that centres trans voices and, most importantly, makes queer people feel really f**ing good about being queer. Nature documentaries are such a clear cultural reference - they’re like comfort food. They’re wholesome, they’re a-political, they’re exciting
story-telling. David Attenborough can explicitly describe animals killing each other, having sex, fighting for power - and there’s no moral judgement put on it. So no one’s going to get angry at a fish for changing sex - right? Well that’s what I thought anyway when I started making Queer Planet. Turns out people do get angry, but that just proves that we need to keep talking about this. So, Queer Planet is my love letter to nature and to the queer community. It is a rallying call for people to change the way they see the natural world and to reframe how we think about our own identities. I want us to look to the fluidity and freedom in the natural world and let ourselves get swept up in it. I want my trans-ness and my queerness to be accepted for what it is; entirely natural and inevitable. I want all queer people to feel the liberation I have found in connecting to my queer family in the more than human world. I want to bring you a bit of silliness and joy.
Queer Planet Pleasance Dome - 10Dome