The director of “Abhorrent Little Scrotum” is Roland Reynolds, who also serves as the artistic director of Fragen Network. After a six-year hiatus from directing—during which he cared for his father and processed personal grief—Reynolds returned to the Fringe with renewed creative energy, staging both Abhorrent Little Scrotum and Hunger in a tight, high-stakes rehearsal window. We had some questions for him.
1. Back at the Fringe with Two Shows: It’s been a few years since Fragen Network last hit the Edinburgh Fringe. Now you’re returning with two new productions in one festival. What made you decide to bring two shows this year, and how does it feel to be back at the Fringe with such an ambitious lineup?
It’s been nine years since Fragen last came to the Fringe, and it feels surreal to be back, this time with two shows. That decision might seem bold, but after six years away from directing, I found myself itching to work again. A lot happened in that time: I’d been caring for my father through a long illness, navigating grief after his death, and writing constantly, whether plays, prose, poetry, fragments. The creative energy built up until it required letting out.
After so much time away, bringing one show just didn’t seem like enough. It’s only now, knee-deep in simultaneous rehearsals for Abhorrent Little Scrotum and Hunger, that I’m reminded just how hard making theatre really is, especially two utterly different, one-hour works with the same cast, rehearsed together in a tight timeframe. But that challenge is part of the joy. This feels like a second graduation, a mad leap that I wouldn’t have taken if I’d remembered how much work it would be. And I’m so glad I didn’t remember. The risk, the exhaustion, the overstretching, that’s all brought me back to something vital that I felt was missing the last few years.
2. Fragen Network’s Bold Style: Your work has been described as radical, physical, political, and relentless. How do those qualities come through in these new productions? In what ways can audiences expect a high-energy or emotionally intense experience from Abhorrent Little Scrotum and Hunger?
Words like “radical,” “physical,” and “relentless” are rich with expectation but we embrace all that. They’re ideals we pursue while we work as much as we aim for our results to live up to them. Our process always starts with deep unknowing, a willingness to feel stupid, to get lost, to chase something we haven’t seen before. That’s what makes the work risky, sometimes messy and chaotic, but it’s how we try to stay truthful.
We don’t make work to shock, although it sometimes does shock. We don’t aim to impress, though we hope to affect. We’re not dancers or singers, mime artists or puppeteers but we incorporate many techniques from these crafts in our work. We try to use face, bodies, voices and space to say something that matters. The physicality we practice leads to fatigue, frustration, joy, confusion, and out of all these real feelings emerges the essence of our drama. That’s how we make it real, and not stylised.
Our politics are personal to each of us and universal to all. The politics of relationships which constitute bodies of people from great to small. It’s less about red vs blue and more about the tiny ways we fail each other and forgive. We don’t go hunting for emotional moments. They find us, creep up on us, through pressure and honesty. If the result feels intense, that’s because we try to meet the work without flinching. We give the audience our energy, unabashed and unreserved, in order to offer an experience we hope they’ll never forget.
3. Origins of Abhorrent Little Scrotum: Abhorrent Little Scrotum is described as a surreal, darkly comic cyber-thriller about a hacker who enters a digital mindscape to save her friend. What inspired this story? Were there particular ideas or personal experiences that sparked this techno-psychological adventure?
Abhorrent Little Scrotum started with three elements: a title, an intense private conversation with myself in the mirror, and the image of a woman walking in out of the blue. Literally, out of blue light. Just like that.
It was back in 2022, coming up to Edinburgh Fringe time. We were deep into working on bringing another play, The Childless Land, to theSpaceUK that year. It’s a bleak, funny, sprawling sci-fi tragedy based on Medea, and I found myself completely swamped. My dad was very ill at the time, and I was emotionally overloaded. My lead actress Nastya was trapped in Russia by the outbreak of war in Ukraine. I loved The Childless Land, but I couldn’t stop wondering, “Who’s going to come to see this strange little play about a woman murdering her family in a far-off galaxy?” It felt like a private grief project, hard to share, impossible to market, far too inward.
So I challenged myself to come up with something people couldn’t ignore. Something that felt irreverent and hilarious, dark and bold enough to draw people in. One day, I was in front of the mirror, spiralling in that self-deprecating way you do when you’re fried and vulnerable, and I muttered in my face, “You abhorrent little scrotum.” It cracked me up, snapped me out of my rut. And then it made me stop. I said it again, and knew instantly, that was the title. That’s something. The story came later, but the tone was born right then.
I don’t recommend ever writing a show from a title. How Roger Corman and his team did it so well for so many years, I have no idea. Progress was torturous but over the years, a story began to reveal itself. What emerged was this techno-psychological tale of a burned-out hacker, exiled at the edge of the world, who gets dragged back into a hallucinatory digital mindscape to save the friend she failed. At its heart, like all our work at Fragen, it’s about self-deception and guilt. Not epic guilt, not guilt for terrible crimes or atrocities, but the everyday emotional misdemeanours we commit against people we love. Saying the wrong thing. Letting someone down. Humiliating or hurting someone in a way you didn’t intend. And then punishing yourself for years over a moment they may not even remember.
The play lives in that disproportionate mental space where a small action becomes massive in retrospect, where the mind becomes a prison, a theatre, a battleground. That’s the “Experience” our characters enter, a psychological landscape born of their own imaginations.
There’s a clear influence from Terence McKenna here. He talks in his lectures about a “computer small enough to swallow,” and I’ve always loved that image. A cross between a psychedelic trip and a self-coded videogame. In our show, it becomes a dream-enhancing Solution inhaled through a cloth, sending you deep into your own self-generated visions. But instead of flashy tech or digital projections, we go low-fi. Voice, body, movement, language. We want to evoke a digital world using the oldest and weirdest technology of all: live theatre.
4. On That Provocative Title: The title Abhorrent Little Scrotum certainly grabs attention. Does it hold a special meaning within the story, or is it meant to set a tone before the play even begins? What do you hope audiences take from the choice of such an unusual name?
The title is there to provoke, of course, but it’s not just for shock value. It’s a tone-setter, a mood, a diagnosis, a mirror. All our work at Fragen is loosely autobiographical, but not always in the obvious sense. There might not be literal biographical detail but the inner tale is always true. If there’s a single subject at the centre of what we do, it’s YOU. The audience member. We want to create the illusion, just now and then, that we somehow know something intimate about you. Not because we actually do, but because we all share more private feelings than we like to admit.
The phrase “abhorrent little scrotum” is one of those self-lacerating things you think at 3am when your past actions buzz in your brain like mosquitos. You said something careless. You failed to show up for someone. You weren’t the person you hoped to be. The play’s two central characters have both betrayed a mutual friend, and now they’re trying in wildly different ways to make it right. But even in their attempts at redemption, they can’t quite escape their egos, their shame, their need to be the hero of their own story.
That’s what the title evokes to me, the strange limbo between self-awareness and self-obsession. It’s easy to spot someone else being an abhorrent little scrotum, but harder to recognise the ways you embody that creature too. It’s easy to spend so long wallowing in guilt about it that you become completely unreachable to the people who still want to connect with you. No one person can own the monopoly on being a terrible scrotum, and sometimes forgiving yourself is harder and more important than anything else. We hope it inspires audiences to come and see the show but we hope they also reflect on it afterwards, wondering who the scrotum really is. The answer might not be as simple as they think.
5. Staging a Digital Mindscape: The play involves a hallucinatory digital mindscape. How are you bringing this virtual world to life on stage? Are you using multimedia, special effects, or physical theatre techniques to represent a “brain hack” in a live setting?
How do you stage a “digital mindscape” without falling into the trap of becoming just another Black Mirror knockoff? Our answer is wilfully analogue. We don’t use projections, cameras, or flashy screens. No VR goggles. Instead, we lean into the live nature of theatre. We have props, voices, bodies, bits of cloth. We have light and sound and the most powerful tool of all, the power of suggestion. We have words. So much effort these days goes into manifesting the real world by virtual means. But we rebel against this. These are the ironic weapons with which we stage our rebellion.
There’s something perverse and thrilling about conjuring cyberspace with the same tools used to summon fairies and swordfights in Shakespeare’s theatre. It’s our petty Luddite resistance against the creeping digital utopia that wants to map every corner of the world and plug us all into the cloud. The Singularity may be approaching but we fly the flag for The Plurality while we still can.
In our version of the future, technology isn’t seamless. It’s messy, imaginative, organic. A “brain hack” isn’t a smooth upload but a theatrical rupture. The characters inhale a neural solution and enter a shared hallucination that reveals as much about their guilt and desires as it does about any external world. And we stage that with the simplest, silliest tool. We play pretend. Behave like children, asking the audience to see what isn’t there.
As Shakespeare said: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them.” That’s the essence of theatre, and that’s our approach. Virtual worlds have existed since the days of Homer. The ultimate mind-hack isn’t code but shared imagination.
6. “Mental Virus” and Modern Metaphors: The idea of a character infected by a consuming mental virus is intriguing. Should we see this as a metaphor for something in real life — like mental illness, online misinformation, or toxic ideas? What real-world questions were you hoping to explore through this cyber-thriller?
We love this question and we hope the answer is yes, absolutely: if you want to see the virus as a metaphor for mental illness, or online misinformation, or toxic love, then please do. The work invites interpretation. We’re not trying to control the meaning. We hold up the void of interpretation and hope the audience lets it gaze into them, just as they gaze into it.
Someone at our preview Q&A the other night noticed that both Abhorrent Little Scrotum and Hunger lack conventional context. There’s no clear setting, no expository handrails. The audience is thrown right in at the deep end. It worried them, understandably, because it’s not obvious whether this might be a mistake. They wondered if we’d forgotten or failed to include it. But it’s entirely intentional. We’re not interested in telling you what something is. We want to offer an experience, one that resonates over time, not just at curtain call.
In Abhorrent Little Scrotum, the mental virus could be any number of things. But for us, at its core, it’s a false promise. It’s the promise of technology. We live in the grip of a great seduction, a sorry fable sold to us about how the digital world will give us unlimited connection, creativity, freedom, transformation. We are discovering the gutting realisation that the fantasy is conditional. The user is the product. The tool we thought was there to serve us is actually re-shaping us to serve it. What began as fun, or useful, slowly turns addictive. The loop closes. We no longer use the tool but have become its content.
In the show, we manifest this through “The Experience.” To access it, you spray The Solution™ onto your Personalised Dream Cloth™, inhale, and let yourself slip into the most intimate simulation of your life. You can build your own inner world or join friends in shared dreams. It’s a psychedelic videogame, a spiritual LSD trip, a synthetic subconscious. And like any immersive platform, the longer you stay under, the more powerful and convincing it becomes. The only limitations are time and your own imagination. But the trap is this. The Experience offers discovery. Real, deep, transformative insight. You might even access the realm of Jungian collective unconscious, some authentic confrontation with the Shadow. But if you stay there, locked in deep inquiry and forget to look up from the microscope, then those discoveries remain inert. They never make it back into the world. You become a better fantasy version of yourself, but not a better person in reality.
The show follows in the wake of this tragic drift. The sense that salvation is always right around the corner, just one more dive, one more simulation, one more click away. But it never arrives. I suppose the deeper theme is that humans are the problem-solving animal. And yet each solution causes exponentially more problems. We keep inventing problems faster every decade, seemingly just to stay busy, burning the road ahead of us as we travel faster down it. The virus isn’t only digital. It’s emotional. Existential. It’s the part of us that can’t bear the messiness of real life, and so flees to a fantasy that slowly rewrites our code. And that’s where the comedy and tragedy of Abhorrent Little Scrotum both live, in that terrible, hilarious place where the human mind keeps running toward itself, hoping the answer is hidden somewhere deeper inside. Around the corner. It rarely is. But still we run.
7. Why Adapt Hunger Now: Turning to Hunger — Knut Hamsun’s novel is a classic portrayal of a starving writer’s struggle. What drew you to adapt Hunger for the stage today? Do you see echoes of its themes of desperation and isolation in our modern world, especially for artists?
That’s a great question and, “Why now?” is one of the core themes behind this production. The need to adapt it came right out of reading the book. I was in a dark place at the time, struggling back towards the light. I’d always heard of Hunger but it took me until I was past thirty to pick it up and have a look. As I turned every page, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like gazing into a mirror. Hamsun has created the most arrogant, grandiose, self-deluded human ever committed to words and yet there’s not one shred of evidence in his life to support his high opinion of himself. I feel exactly the same way about myself, and I suspect many people, especially artists, live this same contradiction to some degree.
The key to the book is self-awareness. Without this self-awareness, there is no redemption for an artist. The main character is based on Hamsun himself, his own experiences, and in the pages of the book is utterly lost in his delusions. This is what makes him so utterly ridiculous, because he cannot honestly overcome the contradictions between his pride and his failure. But he does leave his starving days in Christiania at the very end and you have to imagine that, like Hamsun, he looks back on that time with open eyes, with a little shame, and out of that reflection comes the masterpiece we know as Hunger. The novel is a reassurance to all of us, as it was to me at a certain point in my life, that in the midst of crisis it can be impossible to step back and assess your situation with balanced reason. But that time will come, and when you do look back, you’ll be able to see the great beauty and value in your suffering. Every day I forget to be humble, life very kindly reminds me not to get carried away with myself.
Hamsun was conscious enough to create a character composed of contradictions he seems to have recognised in himself. He pitted his arrogance and his worthlessness in a life-and-death struggle for dominance over this character’s soul. With great love, tenderness and skill, he bullies and betrays this character in a way so savage that we can’t help loving him for all his delusions. And I, reading the book, was inspired to embody him for the same reasons, to beat and bully and ridicule him because it’s an opportunity use theatre to play with the contents of my own life without taking it all so seriously. It’s so much fun to be surrounded by actors whose job it is to grind me into the dirt. I’m actually a bit shocked by how much they enjoy it, but there you are.
The best time to read this book, and to adapt it for the stage, is always now because the plight of an artist has never changed, and our culture gets more and more bound up in ever narrower cultural expressions. AI is part of this movement, a device which produces art out of amalgamations. The struggle of an artist is to do something new, always new and that’s a gamble. You run the risk of your originality being rejected, but that’s the risk you have to take because the potential reward for culture when an artist hits the nail on the head is extraordinary. It’s important to remind ourselves to keep struggling, even as culture closes down and AI threatens to take away our opportunities. Maybe we must all remain struggling artists but at least we can do things which AI can never do.
8. Challenges of Adaptation: Hunger is famous for its intense stream-of-consciousness and inner monologue. How did you approach turning that deeply internal story into live theatre? What creative choices did you make to show the swings from delusion to despair on stage?
Hunger is a work of alchemy, in a spiritual and artistic sense. Hamsun takes the base matter of his life and transforms it into gold. As soon as that became clear to us, the focus of the adaptation became quite clear. Throughout the book, he rubs up against characters and situations which distress and disturb him, not yet aware that recreating these figures in prose will satisfy his artistic needs. To us, the mission was to embody on the stage what must be described on the page. To hint at this process of absorbing unconsciously the material which would constitute his future masterpiece.
As a writer and director, I’m primarily fascinated by the visual and by the poetic before I consider making direct story choices or presenting information to the audience in neat packages. One of the reasons I decided to cast myself as the Writer is because I’m very thin and always have been. My own ribs give me an immediate aesthetic of Hunger for free, which means that I can turn the attention of the show away from Hunger, paradoxically. That Hunger always lurks in the background and I can bring it out, I can express it any time with face and gesture, with pose and movement, with the voice. The main challenge of any adaptation for me is to find the one single word which summarises the inner nature of what I found on reading the material in the first place. Here, there are so many options and I came to the rehearsal room with almost too many ideas. Delusion, starvation, pain and small wounds, insects, masterpieces, the battles with God, the rejection of family, the struggle to succeed as an artist and maintain integrity. The novel is so rich for a work so short. All of these could of course be demonstrated on the page through scene construction, design choices, acting choices and other techniques. But none of them got to the heart of what Hamsun was doing with his stream-of-consciousness and inner monologue, which is such an intense and famous aspect of the novel. To my mind, these techniques are the novelist’s mode of generating pictures of this world in the reader’s imagination. The effect is constructed more from these vital, almost viral impressions cemented by the exposure of one or two crucial details rather than a meticulous attempt at faithful reconstruction.
In the theatre, the equivalent to all of this description is embodiment. It took me a while to realise it, but it was the embodiment of these characters which would define the process by which Hamsun digested his past experiences and manifested them as an artistic production. Of course you can use monologue and stream-of-consciousness to bring this to an audience, and that was my first thought because I come from a verbal background. In rehearsals, though, the words began to drop away. They seemed so inappropriate. Instead, our process became to establish Expressionistic vignettes to hold the two-dimensional characters who inhabit Hamsun’s world, to spark them into life like spirited automata. The Writer brushes against these in his daily life while he’s struggling to sell his play about medieval monks or his analogy of a burning bookshop full of boiling brains, never suspecting that all around him is the very material that will one day make him a household name.
9. A “Bold and Hilarious” Take: Your adaptation is described as bold, sometimes hilarious, experimental and immersive. What can audiences expect in terms of style and presentation? Are there any surprising or modern twists in how you’ve reimagined this Nobel Prize-winning novel?
I don’t think there are any modern twists in the conventional sense. In fact, that might be the twist, that we don’t twist anything at all. At Fragen, our work begins from the inside out. We try to uncover the inner image behind whatever the external form might be. That’s the foundation. That’s the method. What results on the stage may often be a counterbalance or contradiction to the inner message in order that we can come closer to revealing by contrast what is going on for us on the inside.
What drew us to Hunger, and links it to Abhorrent Little Scrotum, is this idea of a character utterly entangled in their own foolishness. The Writer in Hunger is, frankly, an abhorrent little scrotum himself. But if he doesn’t know it yet, at least Hamsun knows it. And he’s trying to write his way toward knowing it. That’s where the humour comes from. His petty self-awareness, his self-sabotage and self-imposed suffering, his endless looping diatribe against God and Fate. He wants to be damned gloriously, smitten by lightning and left in ruins. Instead, he endures a pain far more insidious and humiliating, a minor suffering without end. And I recognised that. His pettiness is my own pettiness. His circular thinking mine too. I am just as ridiculous as he. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
So we’re not quite chasing modernity. We’re chasing something timeless. Those dreams which have haunted humanity for as long as we’ve been self-reflective. The Writer’s memories, actions, hallucinations are there on the stage, interpreted through our work. But only insofar as they give us a route to express his inner state. That’s the drama. That’s the mountain he makes from a molehill. We make that mountain onstage.
Stylistically, the work is intense, physical, immersive. You’ll see influences everywhere, from German Expressionism and the Neue Tanz of Mary Wigman and Harald Kreutzberg to Ohno and Hijikata’s Butoh, from mime to puppetry, from Munch to Käthe Köllwitz. Harold Bloom talks about the “anxiety of influence,” but we at Fragen try to embrace the influence and not suffer any anxiety from recognising the power of what went before us. We sit gladly on the shoulders of giants. We honour them in movement, image, rhythm. If the audience finds Hamsun in the work, that’s wonderful. But they might also glimpse Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Hijikata Tatsumi, even a flicker of Chaplin’s tragic clown. Ultimately, we’re not trying to modernise Hamsun. We’re trying to amplify the ache inside him. And that’s a timeless ache.
10. Two Journeys – Common Threads: Although one play is a cyber-thriller and the other a literary adaptation, both put their characters through extreme psychological journeys. Do you see a common thread between these works? How do they complement or contrast each other in exploring obsession, reality versus illusion, or inner demons?
On paper, the two plays couldn’t seem more different. Abhorrent Little Scrotum is a cyber-thriller sprung from psychedelic digital nightmares, while Hunger is a literary adaptation of Hamsun’s existential masterpiece. But from the beginning of this process, I’ve had the growing sense that they’re haunted by the same ghosts. At their core, both stories revolve around characters telling themselves a lie so deep and enduring that it becomes the architecture of their lives. In that sense, they’re kindred spirits. All Fragen projects begin with characters who are living a fundamental lie. We dig into that lie to find where the drama, and humanity, begins.
The lies aren’t too explicit. There’s power in ambiguity; it gives the audience room to wrestle with the story themselves. But both plays are deeply concerned with the friction between guilt and arrogance. The characters in ALS haven’t committed any cosmic-level sin but they blow their failings up into epic tragedy. And I do that too. We all do. The title Abhorrent Little Scrotum came from that moment of brutal honesty with myself in the mirror. I was picking myself apart in a spiral of self-hatred when I realised how hilarious my struggle was. There’s artistry in these ridiculous private insults. They’re absurd and strangely poetic.
That same sensibility runs straight through Hunger. The narrator is so consumed with his own perceived worthlessness that he lashes out at God for assigning him such a petty, humiliating life, despite never having committed a sin serious enough to deserve damnation. He almost wants to commit some grand, unforgivable act, simply to justify the way he feels about himself. To be condemned and have it over with. But he never does. He is suspended in tragicomic limbo, a man who believes himself monstrous without the courage to do something truly monstrous. That paradox is very close to what we’re exploring in Abhorrent Little Scrotum too.
There’s this deep philosophical tension in both pieces between our cosmic insignificance and the overwhelming centrality of our inner lives. We can never decide whether we are the centre of the universe or totally irrelevant. The unacceptable truth, I suspect, is that we’re both. And we struggle with that contradiction every day.
From that central knot, the plays begin to diverge wildly. The aesthetics, the structure, the tone, even the use of verbal language, each piece grows in its own direction. But they share that same gravitational pull. We’ve always been fascinated by the tension between original work and adaptation. Our previous projects, like Blush of Dogs, our take on the myth of Thyestes, and King for a Day, a triptych based on Medea, also live in that space. Even our thoughts for future work (Macbeth, Woyzeck) circle the same thematic core, showing characters grappling with destiny, isolation, and the warped mirror of self-image. That’s where the drama lives. That’s where we live.
11. Dark Humor in Dark Situations: Your productions often weave dark humor into serious subjects. Why is humor an important tool for you when tackling heavy themes like despair or digital paranoia? How do you hope that mix of laughter and tension lands with the audience?
Our shows have always had a kind of uncomfortable energy. We don’t aim to shock, but somehow we manage it. I think it’s because we make work in that space of nervous tension where something has to give, and sometimes what gives is laughter. For me, dark humour is a way of surviving life’s darkness and cracking open the outer shell to allow in the light. It permits audiences to let something in before they realise what goblin it is that’s slipped in the door. The darkest laughter is often when you laugh at someone, not with them. That’s a line which can be uncomfortable to tread, especially when you end up on the wrong side of it. That’s exactly where we want the audience, especially with these two plays. They are both about characters so incorrigibly, unforgivably arrogant that it might be a pleasure to see them brought down a notch or two. Yet we cannot help feeling guilty to ridicule even such a person in their suffering.
We work to create moments where the audience is led into laughter and then made to question whether they are laughing because something’s genuinely funny or because everyone else is. They might squirm with discomfort and laugh from anxiety when they’d rather gaze in silent pity. Maybe they should stand up and protest. No one ever has but wouldn’t it be fascinating if they did. We are fascinated by catharsis but it isn’t our aim. We don’t make “sad shows” or “funny shows.” We make shows where the triumphs come at unbearable costs, where the pain is laced with absurdity. Our characters are often deluded, their perspectives skewed. And we invite the audience into that skewed vision to examine it coldly rather than to blindly endorse it.
I don’t expect a specific reaction. I don’t even expect engagement. Sometimes people fall asleep. For a while. That’s fine. You can’t control how people respond, and we wouldn’t want to. We design the shows with multiple layers of interpretation so that if someone watches passively, they’ll still get something. But if they tune in deeply, start asking questions, start doubting what they see then they’ll get something else entirely. And that’s where humour becomes essential. It’s a Trojan horse. Sometimes the most cutting truths sneak in through a laugh.
12. Physical Theatre and Movement: Both shows seem to lean heavily on physical performance. How do you use movement and physicality to tell these stories? Can you share an example of how a scene uses physical theatre to express something words alone might not?
We’re not dancers. And yet movement is central to how we tell stories. The way we think about it, words are explanations. Movement is the thing itself. If we can express it physically, why water it down with language? Music can help, but we try not to rely on rhythm or choreography in a formal sense. We look for internal frequencies. Movement should come from inside the character’s emotional landscape, not from the beat. It should feel inevitable, not decorative.
One key example in Hunger, and this is all over social, so I’m happy to talk about it, is the moment where the Writer puts on the dress of his beloved. He wears her hat. Her makeup. He dances alone in his room as if it’s hers. It’s surreal. Intimate. Ridiculous. And it’s exactly what art often is: the impossible attempt to become someone else. To close the gap between your own interior world and the unreachable heart of another.
In Hamsun’s novel, this man falls in love, ruins it, and then watches her disappear into someone else’s life. She becomes unreachable. So he breaks into her image, her iconography, as if that could bring her back. It’s delusional. It’s performative. But it’s honest. As theatre-makers, we resonate with that deeply. We are imitative animals. We try to understand people by becoming them. But it’s never quite real. There’s always something grotesque or uncanny in the attempt. That dissonance, that gap, is what we put on stage.
Earlier in the show, we use masks and costume to externalise the Writer among the other characters, like the Duke, a gynaecologist of rather dubious character, so we can show the Writer inhabiting scenes that may only exist in his imagination. This is the way we manifest our impression of the book on the stage rather than just creating a direct dramatisation of the novel beat for beat. It’s a physical reinterpretation, it’s our response to it. Our attempt to digest it through the body, through gesture, through form. And that’s something a book alone can’t do. That’s something only theatre can achieve.
13. Asking the Hard Questions: Fragen Network aims to ask difficult questions without forcing easy answers. What are some of the provocative questions you’re posing in Abhorrent Little Scrotum and Hunger? When the lights go up, what conversations or reflections would you love audiences to have?
One strong approach to asking difficult questions in theatre requires taking a clear social stance or “tackling” a particular theme like mental health, poverty, or power using cutting-edge rhetoric and fired-up argument across both sides of the debate to create a thematically balanced but dramatically satisfying resolution to one of society’s burning problems. But our approach to questions at Fragen Network doesn’t come at them with such a direct glare. The questions that drive us are older, simpler, sometimes almost impossible to define and always much harder to answer.
For me, the questions referred to in our name, “Fragen”, are the kinds of questions that children ask. They just ask the best questions. Children don’t filter their questions by relevance or propriety. They don’t try to ask the right thing at the right time. They ask everything, especially the things adults are afraid to be asked. Why are things the way they are? Why do we keep doing this? Why are you sad? Why do people lie? Why do we pretend not to know? It took me a long time to realise how “Fragen” has always meant this to me. Of course I’ve known that it means “questions,” but I think I’ve only just truly understood the link between questioning and childhood quite recently. Real questioning. Not the curated curiosity of adult panels or think pieces, but the raw, chaotic, why-is-the-sky-blue type of inquiry that children are constantly flinging at the world.
Those are the kinds of questions Abhorrent Little Scrotum and Hunger are circling. There’s no tidy message, and very view arcs land smoothly or cleanly in our inquiries. We try to cultivate that same spirit of relentless, playful, sometimes anarchic interrogation we used to have as children, full of that same sense of wonder and panic. Combining this with an awareness of a frightening world headed for catastrophe, we wonder whether there are much simpler solutions to the problems that face us as a species. It’s a common task in schools to ask children about the way the world will be in fifty years but it seems rare that anybody listens to the results.
14. Personal vs. Political: In 2019 you directed Hell Yes I’m Tough Enough, a satirical look at politics. Would you say these new plays carry social or political commentary too, or are they more personal and psychological? Do they speak to how we handle mental health, technology, or poverty today?
I’ve always struggled with the idea that personal and political are separate categories. Everything I make is political not because it’s trying to push a contemporary position relevant to the landscape of party and patriotism, but because it’s rooted in what we suppress, what we distort and what we pretend to ignore. Hell Yes I’m Tough Enough was overtly political, yes, a satire of the red-vs-blue spectacle we’ve all become numb to. But even that piece wasn’t really about party politics per se. Rather, it exposed the dysfunction of a system that’s long since stopped serving the complexity of modern life. Neither red nor blue came out of it very well.
These two new plays are different. They’re not about Westminster. They’re dream logic plays, rooted in the subconscious, where truth and fiction blur and reform endlessly. I’m less interested in the soap opera of politics and more compelled by quiet, internal, personal battles. I am consumed with the stories we tell ourselves in order to stay sane, the rituals we perform to keep the chaos at bay. Mental health, technology, poverty. These are eternal political issues. How we treat one another. How we live in a society of strangers. How we behold our fellow humans. I care about these things deeply, but I don’t engage with them through the headlines of our hysterical daily news. I try to come at them more obliquely, through feeling, through image, through myth and memory.
I think it’s the beautiful thing about Hamsun’s book, that he presents practically no social commentary whatsoever. He shows the world and he allows you to make up your own mind, to come to your own judgement around it. He’s not frightened that readers should interpret his clear vision as a cold heart, and neither are we. Any reader who gives their full attention to his work will see a deeply sensitive mind at work, for all his personal and political failings. It’s important, of course, not to forget Hamsun’s own appalling politics later in life, even as we appreciate the great genius of his early work.
15. Full Circle at Fringe: You wrote and directed plays at the Fringe when you were still a teenager. Now, years later, you’re back with major new works. How have you grown as a theatre-maker since those early days? Do lessons from your first Fringe shows still influence your work now?
Bring money for food, bring an umbrella and solid shoes, don’t sleep on the floor and do not, under any circumstances, try to walk from Waverley Bridge Station to Edinburgh Airport at two in the morning! These are the Fringe lessons I only had to learn once, 17 years ago. The Fringe is creative and wild, it’s fun and frivolous, but there’s also an intense practical side to it that can quickly get away from you if you’re not attentive to it. Everyone who’s done it more than once knows you need to take care of yourself and have fun. That’s the practical side. But in terms of artistic growth, I’d say my development has been more of a strange spiral than a straight line.
2008 was my first time at the Fringe. I was sixteen. I’d written Stalemate at fifteen, this little three-hander about an irresolvable conflict between a Catholic priest and a married woman, and directed it the following year. We got one five-star review, starved nearly to death, flyered in the rain, lost money, made friends. It was glorious. I was hooked. But what shaped me that year and every year I’ve returned to the Fringe wasn’t the work I was bringing but the exposure to everything else happening around me. Some of the most astonishing, unrepeatable theatre I’ve ever seen has been at the Fringe, and it totally rewired my sense of what theatre could be.
It also gave me a completely false sense of what audiences are like. Fringe audiences are so open, so curious, so ready to go on weird journeys. I assumed all theatre audiences were like that. Unfortunately, this is not the case. But I still chase that feeling. That hunger for discovery. Since then, I’ve changed in almost every way. I’ve trained, matured, unlearned, re-learned. And yet I’m still drawn to the same questions. How do we live with contradiction? How do we navigate irresolution? What lies beneath the surface of things, and what explains the reasons why people do the things they do? The titles have changed, the style has evolved, the situations are stronger and more intense, but the core inquiry is the same.
16. Training and Influences: You trained at the Drama Centre London and have international experience too. How has your training or cross-cultural experience shaped your artistic approach? Do they show up in the style or perspective of these two shows?
Drama Centre basically reawakened my body. I left an outdoors, physical childhood to go into a Catholic monastery in Somerset which was a supremely cerebral environment to grow up in. I was always into theatre and music in that time but even my performance became filtered through language, wit and text-based projects. But at Drama Centre, none of that was enough. In fact, the whole pyramid was turned upside down and I ended up at the bottom of the heap because of my dry intellectual background. We were thrown headfirst into movement, dance, and physical composition. Suddenly it wasn’t about what you said but how you stood, how you breathed, how you let the work live in your body. Drama Centre reintroduced me to my spine, which had been crushed by early loss. In the hands of those captivating teachers, driven, at times brutal, but relentlessly supportive, I felt like a plant rejuvenated with water after a long drought.
It was unquestionably a return to childhood. I was a wild little creature growing up, climbing rocks, fighting my friends, swimming in the sea. But when I discovered poetry, I developed a different, slower, inner appreciation for the world and nature. I took a step back, became separated from what was around me and began to wonder about the deeper layers of what was really going on. All of this knotted me up in language, which has always been important to me. But training helped me unpick that and add another, forgotten element to my work. It got me back to play, back to risk. It reminded me that theatre isn’t a museum for perfect presentation but a living, breathing event full of chaos and fun.
Working internationally has been a continuation of this growth. Playing with non-English-speaking actors and collaborators has forced me to create structures for projects which can cross linguistic barriers and appeal to audiences around the world. At the same time, watching how different cultures treat storytelling, silence and movement grounds me in the knowledge that theatre doesn’t belong to any one tradition. That’s something I’ve carried into these new shows. There’s dream logic, yes, but also a willingness to go off the edge, to stay with discomfort, to trust image and gesture as much as text. I think what I’ve learned above all is that there’s no single way to tell a story. If you commit, fully and truthfully, the audience will follow you anywhere.
17. What’s in a Name – “Fragen” Network: Your company’s name literally means “questions” in German — very fitting. How did the name come about, and what does “Fragen” mean to you in terms of your artistic vision?
Sounds so pretentious, doesn’t it, and I love that because we embrace pretentiousness with lashings of irony. We’re not as pretentious as we seem. The meaning behind the name is quite simple. As we said above, our Fragen work is chaotic and vulnerable because we are channelling the spirit of play we remember from our childhoods. Children ask all the best questions, the only important questions. Our name “Fragen” refers to these kinds of questions that children ask as much as to the deeper philosophical questions of life which have remained unanswerable through all humanity. Adults tend to grow out of asking stupid questions, whether to protect themselves from ridicule or to provide a secure foundation to help the next generation learn about the world. But artists must retain and cultivate that sense of blind wonder so that they never cease to grow. It’s hard to grow if you’re not open to your own ignorance. Every project is a test of knowledge, of understanding, of technique. You have to have the courage as a theatre-maker to stand in front of your colleagues or an audience and admit that you are learning. That’s the process of making any art.
The name came about after I wrote and directed a play called Planter’s Island at Drama Centre It shocked me, because accidentally, without knowing how, managed to put my subconscious on the stage. It was built out of dream work and chaotic, childlike play. Afterwards, I went through a period of trying to explain to myself how it had happened on that stage but I couldn’t figure it out. Then a small voice inside me told me, don’t explain it. Let it go. It took me a long time, but eventually I listened. I knew then that the route I had to go down was about questions rather than answers. But Questions Theatre, it sounded so bad. So I cycled through the word “questions” in a few languages and hit on Fragen. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
18. Two Shows, One Team: You’re staging two different plays back-to-back, with the same core team and even some of the same actors. How do you manage the practical challenge of rehearsing and performing two shows at once? Does having the same team bring a special cohesion?
It’s demanding, to be honest, and more demanding than even I thought it would be. But when you see the team rise to the demands, there is nothing more exciting. A crucial step in this process was casting because just as important as finding actors suitable for a whole variety of roles, if not more so, was finding actors with the mentality to carry a lot of creativity on their shoulders. The same is required of our technicians, especially our brilliant stage manager, because the demands of producing two shows are immense.
I spent six years in a form of exile from the theatre, unable to direct for a number of reasons that I’ve written about elsewhere. In that period, I think I allowed myself to forget the gravity of a piece of theatre. Even a small production like this takes huge effort from a devoted team, especially on a small budget. To mount two plays at the same time, therefore, and in three weeks before our preview, it has been nuts. But you’re right, there is a special cohesion that emerges. I specifically chose actors who bring an editorial mind to the mission because both shows require creative contributions from each participant. It’s tempting to be a dictator but sometimes the pleasure in a director’s job is to open the floor to external ideas.
When our team feels a certain ownership over the shows, it helps us to draw on those special reserves of energy necessary when the work gets overwhelming, which it does from time to time. Different projects require different creatives. Some plays require an actor to turn up on time, learn the lines and follow the blocking. These shows have demanded much more input and each performer has brought a unique set of skills and experiences to the table. It’s been fascinating, and we hope the results will speak for themselves.
19. Beyond Edinburgh – Future Plans: Do you have plans for Abhorrent Little Scrotum or Hunger after the Fringe? Could they tour or transfer to London? More broadly, what’s next for Fragen Network after the festival?
We are London-based so our plan is to run the shows as a double bill in London for a number of weeks at the right venue for our work. We know there is a huge audience in London for strange, experimental, alternative theatre and those are the people we’re always trying to reach with our work. Our preview at the Drayton Arms was sold out to just such a crowd who really seemed to revel in what we were sharing with them. The kind of work we make is dark and intense but it’s fun too. It’s the work we love to see and we know there are plenty of like-minded viewers out there who want to see it as well.
After that, we hope to take the show around the UK and abroad. From my background, I’m connected to South Wales and to North West England. Our producer Yixuan is from Mainland China, our producer and actor Nastya is from Belarus and Russia, our actor Angel is Mexican living in Spain and our actor Zaza has deep ties with Morocco, while our designer Denis is Estonian. It’s an international cast and crew so we want to find ways to share our work around the world for non-English-speaking audiences. That’s why we prioritise making our work visual and physical, so that it can easily translate across cultures and blast through the language barrier. We don’t want to be stifled by one single cultural outlook. We make work for anyone who loves the funny, the bizarre, the emotional.
20. Audience Takeaway: Finally, what do you hope audiences take away from these two plays? Whether it’s an emotional reaction, a question that lingers, or a new perspective — what would make you say, “Yes, that’s exactly why we created these shows”
We had a lively Q&A after our preview the other day and it was such a great reminder of how creative an audience and its members really are. They don’t ask you what they plays are about. They tell you. It was so fascinating to sit back and field questions about thoughts and themes they had extracted from the piece without us ever having considered putting them in there in the first place. So the answer to your question is a delighted, “No!” There is nothing specific we hope audiences take away from the two plays other than that they take something. Whatever they find. They might come and simply have a good time, or a horrible time. They might hate the plays, and that’s their right. They might see something of what we think the plays are about or they might come up with something utterly different. They might invent elaborate backstories and find complex symbolic analogies to contemporary political issues which might be totally unintended. That’s their right.
All we ask from an audience is what they bring in to the theatre, not what they take out. Open eyes, an open heart, an inquiring mind. Listen to us, watch us, then decide. That’s all. Our shows lack context and this can disorient viewers because we are seeking context all the time. But this is a deliberate choice in our work. We embrace the chaos, we throw the audience in at the deep end. Sink or swim, we just hope they hold on until the end. We have only failed if people are bored, but even boredom is a response we can embrace. This may all sound like cliched rhetoric, but we mean it. We ask the audience to come and see for themselves.
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Roland Reynolds Artistic Director of the Fragen Network, Questions from Pat Harrington.
About Fragen
London-based theatre company with an international outlook, dedicated to creating radical, physical, and emotionally powerful new work. We use dark humour and a raw physical language of expression to put a slice of life under the microscope of theatre. Our drive is to ask the difficult questions and leave the answers hanging.
