Counter Culture

There’s something about a Fringe show set in a laundrette that immediately makes you lean in. Maybe it’s the hum of the machines, maybe it’s the way people behave differently when they think no one’s watching. Spin Cycle takes that instinct — that quiet, nosy curiosity — and turns it into a queer love story that slips between memory, myth and the mundane. It’s tender, strange, and a little bit disorienting, like overhearing a couple argue in public and realising you’ve wandered into the middle of something you shouldn’t understand but somehow do.

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Talking to the team behind it, you get the sense they’re not interested in neat answers or tidy emotional arcs. They’re more concerned with the mess — the stains, the rewashing, the things we keep trying to fix even when we know they’re already worn through. What follows is a conversation that feels as intimate and slippery as the play itself.

Spin Cycle unfolds in a laundrette — a place that’s both public and strangely intimate. What made you realise this was the perfect setting for a queer love story that refuses to stay neatly folded?

ZOFIA: A Launderette is such a liminal space. Its whole reason for existence is to be a place of transition: you enter with dirty clothes and leave with clean. I felt that it is the perfect setting for a play that exists to examine that feeling of being in the midst of transition, being somewhere between forgetting and remembering, between loving and not. I also think the phrase “air your dirty laundry” is aptly fit.

You add memory slippage, absurdism, and a wash cycle that bends time. How did you find the balance between emotional truth and theatrical strangeness?

BETHAN: The absurd space versus the tense scene work is a part of this play that’s very exciting to build on. In many ways the launderette feels like a third character, or entity. It plays a vital role in pushing Noel and Kitt to try again at the top of the play. There’s a sense the space may even have some control over their fate as a couple and maybe is pushing them to some conclusion but as we learn, Kitt and Noel can’t help but have the same conversations over and over again. Their dialogue is pacy and naturalistic and as far as we know they are emotionally truthful. Unless someone knows more then they let on?….

The play champions Irish heritage and queer, gender-non-conforming characters. How do those identities shape the emotional engine of the story?

RHIANNON: The characters queer identity or ‘irishness’ isn’t there to make any kind of political statement, they’re simply who the characters are. Those identities affect how they move through the world, how they understand love, belonging and themselves. The play places two different experiences of Irish and lesbian identity side by side. Noel is a working class, non-binary artist from Northern Ireland whose identity is shaped by financial insecurity, community expectation and navigating a world that wasn’t built for them. Kitt is an Irish-American who has inherited wealth and whose connection to Ireland is rooted in family history rather than lived experience. Spin Cycle, at its core is a love story and it explores how love can exist between two people whose understandings of home, privilege and self are radically different.

“Eyes lock. Hearts thump. But something is off.” What’s the “off” for you?

ZOFIA: It’s the feeling of Deja vu. Deja vu is described as “an illusion of memory whereby—despite a strong sense of recollection—the time, place, and context of the “previous” experience are uncertain or impossible.”

The show has been described as Eternal Sunshine meets The L Word. What feels accurate about that comparison — and what doesn’t?

ZOFIA: Spin Cycle and Eternal Sunshine both seek to answer the same question- why is heartbreak intrinsically tied to the joy of love? There are themes of memory and repression in both as well, although Spin Cycle remains more ambiguous than Eternal Sunshine. As for The L Word, well, there is plenty of Talking, laughing, loving, breathing, fighting, fucking, crying, drinking, riding, winning, losing, cheating, kissing, thinking, dreaming in both.

The laundrette becomes a suspended world where past and present collide. Did you imagine it as a memory, a metaphor, or a place where truth stops hiding?

BETHAN: The launderette may have more hope for their relationship than they do. It’s certainly somewhere where hard conversations are forced out. It is somewhere the truth stops hiding and it feels like somewhere that has existed forever and will continue to until the cycle reaches an end the launderette is satisfied with. The liminal space has been an important factor in creating a neutral zone for Noel and Kitt to explore their guilt, lust and ultimately loss. Thematically thinking of the setting as the launderette, are we washing something until it’s ragged and worn and finished, or are we cleansing something and rescuing stained memories?

Class quietly shapes the story. How consciously did class weave itself into the writing?

BETHAN: When we started this project it was a short twenty minute scene with a hint of a class divide. As we have lived with the characters, certain nuances emerge as obvious directions to take them both. Noel and Kitt really do clash in many ways, notably Kitts inherited wealth from her grandad and Noel inherited orange sash from theirs. It felt important to flesh out where each may have struggled or bloomed forming their identities and their place in the world.

Bethan Rose talks about a “complicit sense of voyeurism.” What do audiences recognise in Kitt and Noel that makes the play feel so familiar?

BETHAN: The couple have a struggling power dynamic and you see them fall apart in front of you, remembering and forgetting in real time. I think audiences will recognise many of the feelings they go through. There are moments where you don’t want to be listening into their conversations, like you’ve accidentally been spying on them. There are also moments where audience members will recognise patterns in the relationship and even take sides. Discomfort and familiarity arises when met with parallels to your own life.

You’re an entirely queer creative team. How did that shape the rehearsal room? BETHAN: At the end of rehearsal we all kiss.

If Kitt and Noel could step out of the laundrette and speak to you, what truth do you hope they’d finally rinse clean? RHI: If I met Noel outside of the Laundrette – I really hope that they found a good therapist to help rinse away their shame about who they are and where they come from. ZOFIA: If Kitt were able to step out of the Launderette, I would hope she could be honest about her entitlement.