What’s striking about Villain Era is how sharply it understands the women it’s speaking to — and the ones it’s speaking for. Juliette Burton, the writer and performer behind the show, doesn’t approach villainy as a gimmick or a costume; she treats it as a lens, a challenge, and sometimes a liberation. Her work has always wrestled with identity, power, and the stories women are handed, but here she pushes further, pulling apart the myths that shape us and the rules we’re expected to obey.
Talking with Juliette, you feel that mix of mischief and seriousness immediately. She’s funny, sharp, and unafraid to sit with the uncomfortable bits — the rage, the conditioning, the cultural policing — and then flip them into something joyful, defiant, and deeply human. Villain Era isn’t just a show; it’s a reclamation. And Juliette is the one steering it, inviting audiences into a world where women get to be complex, loud, powerful, silly, sexy, nerdy, and unapologetically themselves. Find out more at the Fringe website.
•Villainous Women — Fiction’s “bad girls” often carry the truths polite society can’t handle. Which villainess taught you the most about power, and what did she give you that the so‑called heroines never could?
Coming to the show you will step into the world of fictional villainous and morally grey women including: Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Catwoman, Rogue, Emma Frost, Goblin Queen, witches like Agatha Harkness or Scarlet Witch, Greek Goddesses, and Yennefer of Vengerberg.
She starts life powerless, unwanted and dismissed, then stops trying to be “good” and starts owning who she is. That was a revelation for me. Heroines are often rewarded for being selfless; villainesses are punished for being powerful.
Rogue is the other key one for me. My favourite comic book character began as a villain in the comic books in the 1980s. In the X-Men, she begins as a villain who absorbs the power and psyche of Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel aka the most powerful Avenger and is terrified she can’t contain it. That fear that embracing your power might make you dangerous, felt familiar to me. Now I realise it only makes you dangerous who people who benefit from you being weak or controlled.
Fearing for her sanity Rogue turned to Professor Xavier for help. When I feared for my own sanity, I too turned to a bald man – Bill Bailey. He inspired me to get into stand up and just like Rogue became a leader in the XMen I also lead people… astray.
One of the things comic book villains and heroes like the XMen taught me is that power isn’t zero-sum. My power doesn’t diminish anyone else’s, it can highlight and sharpen it. The real shift happens when we stop seeing each other’s strength as a threat, and start learning how to exist alongside it in harmony.
If we can do that – personally, culturally, collectively – we don’t just survive each other’s differences but we become stronger because of them. That feels, to me, like the most hopeful “Villain Era” there could be.
Then there are witches like Agatha Harkness and Wanda Maximoff, who show that women’s power often grows with age which is exactly why we’re encouraged to disappear as we get older. Not me. I’m determined to get louder, prouder and embrace my power.
And Dark Phoenix, who taught me that the problem isn’t our innate power itself, but other people’s inability to cope with it.
It’s not even a case of ‘step into your power’ – we always had it. But now, we’re remembering our power and becoming it.
• Good Girl Conditioning — You describe yourself as a former “good girl”. What’s the most insidious part of that conditioning that you had to unlearn to step into your Villain Era?
The most insidious part of “good girl” conditioning is how deeply it ties identity, worth and safety to being agreeable, pleasing and non-disruptive. I learnt early that taking up space, having opinions, changing my body or challenging other people all come with social punishment. So I ended up chasing an impossible version of myself that was never meant to be achievable.
And even when I thought I’d attained it, I wasn’t allowed to veer from it even for a moment. You’re punished if you veer off the course that’s set and you’re punished if you achieve it – just look at women in the spotlight, allowed a brief stint there before they’re torn down one way or another.
And I think a lot of those “goals” are deliberately unattainable, set by systems and industries that profit from you feeling like you’re not enough. Comedy helped me unpick that, because it isn’t built on perfection or pleasing everyone. It’s built on truth, risk and joy. And there’s very little profit in joy, just freedom.
• Nerd Culture Politics — Nerd culture loves a redemption arc but fears female rage. How much of Villain Era is you reclaiming a space that was never built with women in mind?
Nerd culture has often been gatekept by people who frame it as “us vs them”, scarcity vs belonging, and who can be very attached to clear binaries of good and bad. It’s interesting, because on the surface nerd culture may love a redemption arc… but underneath that is the question: why do we need redemption at all and who decided someone was “beyond it” in the first place?
A lot of nerd storytelling, especially in comics, is basically modern mythology. The X-Men are essentially Greek gods in cool jackets. They constantly wrestle with identity, power and belonging, and just like ancient gods and goddesses we can turn to each of them to help us through an aspect of being human that we might be wrestling with at any given time in our lives. And I think the most compelling stories are the ones where hero and villain aren’t fixed states, but internal struggles.
The idea that nerd culture “fears female rage” is partly true in some spaces, but not all. I’ve also seen it be one of the few places and people that properly welcome, encourage and embrace powerful, complex women – women who are allowed to be messy, angry, moral, immoral, all of it.
What fascinates me most is the idea that society has to exist as if there’s a “them versus us”, eg men versus women, or nerds versus jocks, or old fans versus new fans, or an old franchise version versus a new franchise version/spinoff. It’s bizarre to me considering that so much of comic books and nerd culture is supposedly about wrestling with unity. The X-Men wrestle with the idea that they are inherently born different and so, do they use their powers to help protect those who would seek to persecute them? Or is tolerance extinction? For either ‘them’ or ‘us’?
The very fact that the nerd culture communities are aware of these conversations makes me feel safer in nerd culture than in other spaces in society right now, purely because we’re having those conversations, albeit via the prism of comic book lore.
All my shows are me reclaiming space… being on stage an inviting people into my world for an hour is my favourite place to be – I get to set the tone and invite people in. No gatekeeping, all inclusive… I wish that meant your food and drink was free but sadly just the joy.
• Sexy vs Silly — Your show promises to be “very silly, very sexy, incredibly nerdy”. Where do you think humour and sexuality meet, and why do British audiences still get twitchy when women mix the two?
Humour and sexuality have always been intertwined for me, they’re both about timing, truth, and not taking yourself too seriously. It still makes me laugh that when I came out as queer, my friends said, “we thought you already knew.” Apparently I was the last to know.
I also think we often confuse sexuality with sensuality and eroticism, and then immediately panic about what women are “allowed” to be in public. There’s still discomfort—particularly in British culture around openly sexual women who are also funny, clever, nerdy, or self-aware. It can disrupt the very tidy Madonna/whore boxes people would prefer to keep us in.
Adding in ‘funny’ confuses those who benefit from forcing women into polarised identities because humour empowers, laughter unites and brings us together, it breaks down pretty little lies about who we are, who we can be and what our roles are.
But the truth is women aren’t one thing. We’re allowed to be silly and sexy and ridiculous and powerful all at once. And if that makes people twitchy, I think that says more about their conditioning than it does about us.
• Rage as Fuel — You’re tackling inequality, bad sex lives, and the cultural policing of women’s behaviour. What role does anger play in your writing — ignition, compass, or something more dangerous?
Anger is definitely the ignition point for my writing. If something makes me angry, it usually means there’s a crack in the system somewhere and that’s where the comedy lives. Big things, small things, bad sex, inequality, cultural policing of women’s behaviour… it all starts with that moment of “hang on, why is this just normal?”
I used to be quite afraid of my anger. Therapy taught me that holding onto it was like holding hot stones except the only person getting burned was me. And that’s still true… if you just sit in resentment. But anger handled properly isn’t destruction, it’s information. It tells you what matters, what’s wrong, and what needs changing.
I’m angry about inequality, I’m angry about the amount of mediocre sex women are expected to quietly accept, and I’m very angry about how tightly women’s behaviour is still policed. But I don’t think anger is my compass, that’s a steadier commitment to belief we can do better. Anger is the spark, not the map.
Anger only becomes dangerous when it’s misused to divide people or distract from where the real power sits. In comedy, I try to aim it somewhere more useful: at the absurdity of the rules themselves. And ideally, we get to laugh at them while they fall apart.
• Queerness and Power — The press release hints at queerness as part of the journey. How does stepping into a “villain” identity open up new ways of talking about desire and identity?
When you’re raised in a culture where female desire is suppressed – whether that’s appetite, sexuality, difference, or queerness – it can start to feel like anything outside the “acceptable” script is automatically wrong. Even just wanting too much, or wanting differently, can get framed as selfish or even villainous.
So stepping into a “villain” identity becomes strangely freeing. It allows you to question who decided the rules in the first place, and why honesty about desire has to be punished. Whether that’s queerness, polyamory, or just forms of attraction and romance that don’t fit neatly into a norm, it all gets labelled as deviation from a story someone else wrote.
But “villainy” is really just perspective. It’s narrative. Good and bad aren’t fixed states – they’re labels we’ve inherited. And once you start pulling at that thread, the whole idea of what’s “normal” or “acceptable” starts to flip upside down in an exciting and liberating way.
• Fantasy Armour — You mention armour made of “hard truths, high fantasy and hilarious punchlines”. What’s the piece of metaphorical armour you didn’t realise you needed until you wrote this show?
Every woman needs a sword right now. That’s just a fact. But since actual armour isn’t exactly socially acceptable in most day-to-day situations, I think what I didn’t realise I needed was a full emotional breastplate – something that lets you walk into the world slightly more protected, but still very much a woman in power.
Or, you know… just better boundaries and less apologising. That too.
• Nerdgasms — You promise “live nerdgasms”. For the uninitiated: what exactly constitutes a nerdgasm, and how do you engineer one onstage without breaking Fringe fire regulations?
A nerdgasm is a kind of euphoric nerd peak—the tingle of recognition, like Spidey sense kicking in, when you feel completely seen by others who accept you, get you, understand your niche references, share your passions – whether that be for a fandom, for a passion or for challenging the status quo. It’s that moment of shared joy when a niche detail suddenly becomes a communal experience.
A nerdgasm happens when fandom, humour, sexuality and storytelling all collide in one room. Because the best nerdgasms aren’t solo, they’re collective. Multiple nerdgasms, if you will.
This cannot be engineered. A nerdgasm in the wild can only happen naturally, organically and only if we give ourselves permission to feel safe and lean in together. All I can do is create the conditions: honesty, play, a bit of chaos and a lot of love and respect. The rest is chemistry.
And if the fire alarm goes, well, we’ve clearly made the show incredibly hot.
• Villain Era Ethics — Every villain thinks they’re the hero of their own story. What’s the ethical line you refuse to cross, even in your Villain Era?
You can be a baddie, just don’t be a dick.
My “Villain Era” reign holds no cruelty or destruction. Just integrity, honesty, agency and refusing to shrink myself to make other people comfortable.
I’ve been the villain in other people’s stories for long enough that I’ve stopped trying to to be the “hero”. Instead, I’m leaning into the villain they’ve already decided I am. At least I look good in black. That doesn’t mean I wish them harm, I just wish them well while I live my life in the fullest, darkest, most powerful way possible. When you embrace your shadow self, turns out the team up is a power up.
That, to me, is the ethical line: don’t lose your humanity while you’re realising your power.
• Cultural Rebellion — Counter Culture readers love a rebellion. Do you see Villain Era as a personal metamorphosis, a cultural protest, or a gleeful act of mischief aimed at the patriarchy?
Villain Era is all of the above and more. Just like a woman, this show is multifaceted and is many things all at once.
Villain Era is all of the above and more. Like most women, it refuses to be just one thing at a time.
It’s a personal metamorphosis, because it’s been shaped by unlearning who I was told to be.
It’s a cultural protest, because so much of what I’m talking about – gender, power, sexuality, identity – doesn’t exist outside of politics, whether we name it or not.
And it’s a gleeful act of mischief aimed at the patriarchy because sometimes the best response to absurd systems that seek to control us is to laugh at them.
But underneath all of that, Villain Era is joyful, silly and fun. It’s a reclamation. It’s permission for me and for the audience to take up space without asking nicely.
What hits you first about Whale Fall is its emotional clarity. Bruna Longo — the show’s writer, creator, and solo performer — speaks about the piece with a directness that makes its themes feel close to the skin. She’s not dealing in abstractions; she’s tracing grief, memory, and the strange beauty in collapse and renewal with a kind of steady, unforced honesty.
In this conversation, Bruna lays out the ideas driving the work and the experiences that shaped it. There’s no grandstanding, no over‑polish — just a clear sense of why Whale Fall exists and what she hopes it stirs in the audience. It’s a piece built on substance, and her reflections carry that same weight.
You can explore the production further on the Fringe listing.
1. You’ve spoken about creating this piece in the aftermath of your father’s death. When grief becomes the raw material of a performance, does the stage feel like a refuge, a reckoning, or something stranger altogether?
I wasn’t setting out to make a play about my father’s death, or even one inspired by it. I started researching death because I was trying to understand what was happening to me, to face it, to face my grief. I am very, very nerdy. And at some point, it became very clear that my way of moving through life, of dealing with everything, is through theatre. As I say in the play, theatre is my religare, my non-religious form of spirituality. But I always want to make one thing clear: the show isn’t a therapeutic exercise about my mourning process. It’s the result of a genuine curiosity about death and grief that grew out of the research I began to help me navigate that experience. The play isn’t the process itself, it’s what came from it. So more than a refuge or a reckoning, the stage is a place of congregation, a place where we come together to share our humanity. And I think that’s what this process ultimately became for me.
2. Western societies have a habit of sanitising death — hiding it behind curtains, euphemisms, and professionalised rituals. What convinced you that theatre could reopen that conversation without slipping into sentimentality or spectacle?
I think if we go back to how theatre was born, we already have the answer to that question. It’s a place where humanity gathers to see itself reflected. And theatre is so raw. Even when we try to make it more like film, with special effects or technology, it’s still fundamentally human. That’s what makes it so powerful and, for me, what makes it the perfect place to face our demons and our fears, to talk about them, and to bring them into the light.
3. The original version of Whale Fall unfolded inside a functioning funeral chapel in São Paulo. How does relocating the work to St Cuthbert’s Church — with its own centuries of burial and memory — change the emotional temperature of the piece?
We perform in a historic chapel in São Paulo that dates back to 1912. So just the fact that the first recorded church on the site where St Cuthbert’s stands today dates from the 12th century is already incredible to me. Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese in 1500, although, of course, Indigenous peoples had been living there for thousands of years before that. But the Indigenous peoples of Brazil had very different cultures from civilizations like the Maya or the Aztec. They didn’t leave behind monumental stone architecture in the same way, so the oldest stone buildings we have are mostly from the Portuguese colonial period. I love history and architecture, and even though I’m certainly not a fan of colonization, whenever I visit historic buildings, I have a deep respect for the lives of the people who occupied those spaces before me. So performing in a place as ancient as St Cuthbert’s certainly adds another layer to the experience. You’re aware that so many people have passed through that space over so many centuries, carrying their own stories, their own joys, and their own grief. I think there’s something very beautiful about adding our story to that long continuum.
4. You imagine your own death as a way of mourning yourself — an impossible act in life, but a potent one in theatre. What did that imaginative leap reveal to you that ordinary grief could not?
Imagining our own death, and really imagining the decomposition process, is actually a very Buddhist practice. I’m Buddhist, so it was something I always knew was done, but I never thought I’d actually be able to engage with it. I was afraid, as I think most of us are, to bring that image into my mind. This play is very much in the tradition of memento mori, an artistic tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, where artists depicted death and mortality to remind us that we’re alive. The full idea is memento mori, memento vivere: remember you will die, remember to live. That’s what imagining my own death has helped me do. Imagining my own death reminds me every day that I am very much alive, and it makes me want to be fully alive until the very last microsecond I live.
5. The show blends autobiography, anthropology, philosophy, and physical theatre. When you’re working across so many registers, how do you keep the ritualistic core of the piece intact?
I always like to go back to the original meaning of things. So, what is a ritual? It’s a set of gestures, words, and formalized actions with symbolic meaning, performed by or in front of a group of people. And when you think about it, theatre is exactly that. Theatre is a ritual. Whale Fall have different layers to it. The dramaturgy is built from ethnographic and anthropological research, together with some autobiographical elements. Then there’s the language of the performance itself. The physicality draws on traditions of physical theatre and also inspirations from Japanese theatre, although they’re not the kind of references an audience would necessarily recognize while watching the show. And then there’s the staging. The decision to perform inside a chapel wasn’t just an aesthetic choice; it was part of creating a ritual space. The scenes are structured in a very ritualized way. Music plays a fundamental role, as it does in so many ritual traditions. Those are the bricks the piece is made of. So the performance isn’t recreating any specific ritual, but it borrows the grammar of ritual to create a shared experience where we can gather and reflect on mortality together.
6. You’ve said that death is perhaps the last taboo in Western culture. Do you think audiences are genuinely ready to confront it, or are they still arriving with the same fear and avoidance you’re trying to unpick?
One of my masters, the director Eugenio Barba, once said in a rehearsal that there is no audience. There is only that one person, and then the next person, and the next, and the next. I’ve carried that with me ever since. So I try to meet each audience member wherever they are. I’ve spoken to people after the show who told me it genuinely shifted something for them, that it helped them look at death with a little more tranquility than they had before. And then, about a month ago, I got a DM on Instagram from someone who had seen the show months earlier. They wrote, “I loved the show, but being inside the chapel in the cemetery was a horrible experience for me because I’m terrified of death.” They spent the whole performance feeling anxious, and yet they were still grateful they came. And I think that’s wonderful. If that’s what the show brought up for that person, then that’s what it brought up. I’m not trying to lead people toward one specific conclusion or emotional response. The only thing I hope is that people begin to think about death as part of life, as something worth bringing to the dinner table, into our everyday conversations. Where that reflection takes them is completely beyond my control. There isn’t a right or wrong way to experience the piece.
7. The São Paulo Showcase is bringing a wave of Brazilian work to Edinburgh this year. What feels distinctly Brazilian about Whale Fall, and what feels universal — something that belongs to anyone who has ever lost someone?
Death is a universal experience. Everybody dies in the end: spoiler alert! But culturally, we relate to death in many different ways. There are a lot of similarities across Western societies, especially in big cities and metropolitan areas, but every culture has its own temperament, its own rituals, and its own emotional relationship with death. Part of the research behind the show was also ethnographic. I became fascinated by the different ways cultures around the world care for their dead and make sense of loss. The performance brings some of those funeral rites into conversation with our own Western, capitalist, highly industrialized experience of death to remind us that the way we approach death isn’t universal, it’s cultural. And once we realize that, we can start asking whether the relationship we’ve built with death is really the one we want. So, of course, the show brings my own perspective: a Brazilian-Italian Latina woman from one of the biggest cities in the world. But underneath all those identities, I’m just another person who’s going to die and going to lose people I love. And that’s the one thing every audience member and I have in common.
8. You’re performing 18 shows without a break at the Fringe. How do you protect your own emotional and physical boundaries when the work itself asks you to revisit grief night after night?
That’s a fantastic question. People have asked me before how I deal with talking about my grief and my father every week, month after month. But the truth is, it’s not really about my grief, and it’s not really about my father anymore. And that’s very important to me. As I said before, the research began because of my father’s death and my attempt to understand my own experience of mourning. But once I decided to turn that research into a performance, it stopped being about processing my grief and started being about sharing the curiosity that had grown out of it: my curiosity about death, grief, and ritual. During the research and rehearsal process, there were definitely moments when it was difficult to face some emotions. But once the show opened, something shifted. It became about celebrating life. So, for me, it’s actually a very joyful show. I know that sounds contradictory because it’s about death, but I don’t experience it as a sad piece. I don’t feel like I have to protect myself emotionally from performing it. Physically, though, that’s a different story. Eighteen performances in a row is a lot, and I’m no spring chicken anymore. So I’m trying to get as strong as I can before Edinburgh. It’s a demanding show for my voice because I sing throughout it, and it’s demanding on my body, especially my spine. During the run, my plan is to sleep well, eat well, take care of myself… and wait until it’s all over before I start celebrating.
9. The press in Brazil described the piece as courageous, ritualistic, and among the year’s best. Does that kind of acclaim create pressure, or does it give you permission to push even further into the uncomfortable questions the show raises?
Honestly, I believe in acclaim as much as I believe in bad reviews. I try not to give either of them too much weight because I don’t think it’s particularly helpful or healthy. Of course, reviews and award nominations are fantastic for the business of show business. They help put bums on seats, they give the work credibility, and they make the show more visible, especially at the Fringe, where audiences have thousands of shows to choose from. That’s all incredibly valuable. But for me, as an artist, what really matters is what happens in the room, in that living moment. That’s theatre. Everything else is important, but it isn’t theatre itself.
10. If an audience member walks out of St Cuthbert’s with one lingering thought — not a neat lesson, but a disturbance they can’t quite shake — what do you hope that thought is?
I want people to leave asking themselves: What kind of relationship do I want to have with death? There’s a Brazilian psychoanalyst, Rubem Alves, who wrote that instead of being something frightening or cruel, death can be a counselor. I love that. We already know we’re going to die: that part isn’t optional. So maybe, instead of trying to forget about death or push it away, we can let that awareness guide the way we choose to live. And that has very practical consequences too. When we allow ourselves to talk about death, we’re much more likely to take ownership of how we want to die. We can leave our wishes behind, have conversations with our loved ones and our doctors, think about palliative care or assisted dying if that is aligned with our values. These are conversations we tend to avoid because they’re uncomfortable, but they’re really conversations about autonomy.
Some shows arrive at the Fringe with hype; Next to Normal arrives with history. It’s a piece that has never sat quietly in the corner, never softened its edges, never pretended that mental illness or grief can be shaped into something tidy.Dominic Lewis seems acutely aware of that. When he talks about the Goodman family, he doesn’t reach for the usual theatrical shorthand. He talks about them the way you talk about people you’ve lived alongside — complicated, contradictory, trying their best, failing, trying again.
What struck us most is the seriousness of his intent. Not the heavy, self-important kind, but the grounded sort that comes from knowing the material can genuinely touch people who’ve lived versions of this story. Lewis isn’t interested in turning bipolar disorder into a plot engine or grief into a poetic flourish. He’s interested in the messy truth: the repetition, the avoidance, the love that curdles into fear, the care that becomes silence because nobody knows what else to do. His rehearsal room sounds like a place built with actual thought — not just emotional ambition, but practical care for performers who may be carrying their own histories into the work.
And then there’s the wider frame. The partnerships with Bipolar Scotland and Held In Our Hearts aren’t window dressing. They’re part of a deliberate attempt to make sure the production doesn’t just stir something up and leave audiences to deal with it alone. Lewis talks about community theatre not as a consolation prize but as a space where proximity matters — where the people making the work are part of the same streets, the same conversations, the same quiet crises as the people watching it.
As Next to Normal heads into the Edinburgh Fringe 2026, this interview feels less like a preview and more like an invitation to look again at what we call “care,” what families are expected to carry, and what healing might mean when truth finally stops being the thing everyone tiptoes around. It’s not neat. It’s not meant to be. But it feels, unmistakably, necessary.
Next to Normal has always been a lightning rod for conversations about mental health. What responsibilities did you feel taking on a story that deals so directly with bipolar disorder, medical treatment and the long shadow of loss, and how did you avoid slipping into cliché or sentimentality?
The responsibility felt enormous, to be honest. Next to Normal is not a show where mental health can be treated as a dramatic device, or where grief can be reduced to something neat, poetic or conveniently resolved by the end of the evening. It asks much more of everyone involved.
The first responsibility was to remember that although the Goodman family are fictional, the experiences around them are not. Bipolar disorder, trauma, complicated grief, medical treatment, family breakdown, emotional avoidance and survival are all things that many audience members will understand personally, either through their own lives or through someone they love. That means the work has to be truthful without becoming exploitative, detailed without becoming clinical, and emotionally open without pushing the audience into a kind of forced sentimentality.
For me, avoiding cliché meant resisting any version of Diana that becomes simply “the ill woman”, “the difficult mother” or “the tragic victim”. She is all sorts of things at once: funny, intelligent, frightened, loving, furious, avoidant, lucid, unwell, self-aware and trapped. Equally, Dan cannot just be “the long-suffering husband”, and Natalie cannot just be “the neglected daughter”. The danger with a show like this is that people become symbols. We have tried to keep pulling them back into being people.
In rehearsal, that has meant constantly asking: what is this person trying to do in this moment? What are they protecting? What truth are they avoiding? Where is the love, even when the behaviour is damaging? That keeps the story human. It stops the production from presenting mental illness as spectacle or grief as a beautiful sadness. Grief is not beautiful when you are inside it. It can be disorientating, repetitive, irrational, boring, exhausting and sometimes even absurd. The show understands that, and we have tried to honour that complexity.
The other big thing was not to make the production anti-treatment, anti-medication or anti-clinical care. That would be a misreading, and frankly it would be irresponsible. The show is much more interesting than that. It asks what happens when treatment exists but care becomes fragmented, when someone’s symptoms are addressed but their personhood is not always fully seen, and when a family tries to survive through silence rather than truth. That nuance is where the production lives.
The press release emphasises “emotional truth, care, accessibility and audience signposting.” How do you translate those values into practical rehearsal-room decisions, especially when working with performers who may have lived experience of the themes?
Those values only matter if they change behaviour in the room. It is easy to put words like care and accessibility in a press release. The real question is whether they affect the process.
Practically, we have tried to build a rehearsal room where people understand that the work can be emotionally demanding, but that nobody is expected to damage themselves in order to make it powerful. I am very clear that acting trauma is not the same as re-living trauma. We are not asking performers to mine their own pain for the sake of a scene. We are asking them to build characters with clarity, technique, empathy and rigour.
That means being specific. If a scene is difficult, we do not just say “make it more emotional”. We look at the action, the relationship, the rhythm, the breath, the interruption, the avoidance, the lyric and the silence. Often the most truthful moments are not the ones where someone pushes hardest.
Care also means giving people the information they need. We talk openly about the content of the show, the pressure points in the material, and what each rehearsal is likely to involve. We have tried to create a culture where people can say if something needs to be handled differently, without it becoming dramatic or awkward. That is particularly important when working on material that may overlap with lived experience. You cannot always know what someone is carrying into the room, so the room has to be built with that possibility in mind.
Accessibility and signposting are part of the same principle. We know the show may land very personally for some audience members, so we are thinking about what happens before and after the performance, not just during it. That includes clear content guidance, programme information, and working with organisations who understand these themes in a much deeper and more specialist way than we do. We cannot control how every person will receive the show, but we can take responsibility for how we frame it, how we support it, and how seriously we treat the conversations it may open up.
Diana’s story is often framed as a critique of the medicalisation of distress. How does your production navigate the tension between clinical intervention and the human need for connection, agency and dignity?
The important thing for me is that the production does not present those things as opposites. Clinical intervention and human connection should not be enemies. In the best circumstances, they should support one another.
What Next to Normal interrogates is what happens when care becomes too narrow. Diana is treated, but she is not always fully heard. Her symptoms are examined, but the emotional architecture of her life, her grief, her family and her sense of self cannot be solved by diagnosis alone. That does not mean diagnosis or medication are wrong. It means they are not the whole story.
The production tries to hold that tension without simplifying it. Diana needs help. The family needs help. Dan needs help. Natalie needs help. But help that removes agency, flattens identity or ignores the human context can become another kind of harm, even when it is well-intentioned.
Dignity has become a key word for us. Diana is sometimes chaotic, sometimes evasive, sometimes deeply unwell, but she must never lose her dignity in the eyes of the production. We are not inviting the audience to observe her from a distance. We are asking them to sit with the discomfort of how difficult it is to care for someone, how difficult it is to be cared for, and how easily love can become control when people are frightened.
The show is also very honest about the limits of love. Connection matters, but love alone cannot treat a serious mental health condition. At the same time, treatment without connection can leave someone feeling like a case rather than a person. That is the central tension for me. Diana needs care that sees her whole life, not just her crisis.
Bare Productions is collaborating with Bipolar Scotland and Held In Our Hearts. What does meaningful partnership look like in practice, and how do you ensure it’s more than a badge of good intentions?
For us, meaningful partnership starts with humility. We are a theatre company. We are not a mental health charity, a bereavement charity or a clinical service. So if we are making work that touches these areas, we have a responsibility to connect with people and organisations who live in that work every day.
The partnerships with Bipolar Scotland and Held In Our Hearts are not there to decorate the production. They are there because the themes of the show have real-world consequences. Bipolar Scotland brings vital awareness and understanding around bipolar disorder, stigma, support and the realities behind a condition that is still widely misunderstood. Held In Our Hearts brings deep care around baby loss and grief, which sits at the emotional root of the Goodman family’s story.
In practical terms, this means making space for signposting, sharing information with audiences, including the charities in our programme materials, and being careful with the language we use around the production. It also means understanding that partnership is not the same as endorsement. We should not hide behind charity logos and say, “That proves we have done the work.” The work is ongoing.
I think meaningful partnership also has to ask: who benefits? If the production raises awareness, but does nothing to direct people towards support, then we have missed an opportunity. If it uses painful subject matter to sell tickets, but does not take care over how audiences are held, then it has failed ethically. Our aim is for the production to create a bridge between the emotional experience of theatre and the practical reality of support, awareness and conversation.
It is also important to say that charity partnership does not make the show safe in a simplistic sense. The material is still difficult. It should be. But it does mean we are taking seriously the fact that audiences may leave with questions, memories, or feelings stirred up. We want there to be somewhere for that energy to go.
Next to Normal is, at its core, a family drama. What did you discover about the Goodman family that feels especially resonant for audiences in 2026, when conversations about trauma, care and survival are finally becoming less taboo?
What feels painfully resonant is that the Goodmans are not a family without love. They are a family with a huge amount of love, but not enough language. That feels very contemporary.
We are much better now, culturally, at saying words like trauma, grief, mental health and survival. That is progress. But naming something is not the same as knowing how to live with it. The Goodman family are caught in that gap. They are surrounded by feelings they cannot metabolise. They know something is wrong, but each of them has built a different survival strategy around it.
Diana’s survival is partly denial, partly memory, partly resistance. Dan’s survival is control, optimism and holding the family together at almost any cost. Natalie’s survival is achievement, distance and anger. None of these strategies are stupid. They make sense. But they are also damaging.
That feels very relevant in 2026 because so many families are trying to have more honest conversations about mental health, but they are doing it inside systems and histories that still reward silence. Families often become the place where care happens by default, whether or not anyone inside that family is equipped for it. The show asks what that does to people.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the Goodmans are not failing because they do not care. They are struggling because care without truth becomes unbearable. Everyone is trying to protect everyone else, and in doing so they isolate each other. That is a very recognisable family pattern, even outside the specific circumstances of the musical.
The show asks what it really means for a family to heal. Do you think healing is possible within the structures we currently have, or is the musical quietly arguing for something more radical?
I think the musical is deeply sceptical of neat healing. It does not offer the audience the comfort of a restored family where everyone has learned the lesson and pain has been tidied away. That is one of the reasons it remains such a powerful piece.
Healing, in Next to Normal, is not a return to the past. In fact, the desire to return to the past is part of what keeps the family trapped. Healing is closer to truth. It is the painful movement from pretending towards acknowledging. That does not fix everything, but it creates the possibility of something more honest.
So yes, I do think the show is quietly arguing for something more radical. Not in a slogan-led way, but in its emotional politics. It asks us to imagine care beyond endurance. It asks whether one person, one marriage, one family home can really hold the weight of serious mental illness, bereavement and trauma without wider support. It asks what we expect families, and often women in particular, to carry privately.
The structures we currently have can help people, absolutely. Treatment can help. Therapy can help. Medication can help. Community can help. But the show exposes what happens when support is fragmented, reactive or inaccessible, and when families only reach for help once they are already at breaking point.
The radical idea in the show is that survival is not enough. Being “fine” is not enough. Holding it together is not enough. Healing requires truth, agency, support, and sometimes the courage to let a family become something different from what it was. That is a much harder version of hope, but I think it is also a more truthful one.
Community theatre is often dismissed as “amateur,” yet your company’s work is described as ambitious, inclusive and values-led. What can community-rooted companies say about mental health and grief that commercial theatre often can’t?
Community-rooted theatre can speak from proximity. That is its power.
Commercial theatre can do extraordinary work, of course, but it is often shaped by commercial risk, marketability, celebrity, critical expectation and the pressure to package difficult themes in a way that can be sold. Community-rooted companies can sometimes move differently. We are not detached from the communities watching the work. We are part of them.
For Bare, the word “community” does not mean lowering artistic ambition. It means widening the purpose of the work. We are interested in making theatre that is artistically strong, but also socially connected. With a show like Next to Normal, that matters. Mental health and grief are not abstract topics for discussion. They are part of ordinary life. They sit in rehearsal rooms, workplaces, friendships, families and audiences.
Community theatre can also challenge the idea that only certain kinds of people are allowed to make “serious” work. Lived experience, empathy, care and local connection are not second-best substitutes for professionalism. They are forms of knowledge. That does not mean good intentions are enough. The work still has to be rigorous. The singing has to be strong. The staging has to be clear. The ethics have to be thought through. But the root system is different.
I think community-rooted companies can say: this story belongs in the room with us. It is not distant. It is not rarefied. It is not something happening to other people. It is here, in the city, in our families, in our friendships, in the audience. That creates a different kind of charge.
The musical’s rock score is famously intense and emotionally charged. How do you balance musical precision with the rawness the story demands, especially in a Fringe environment where time and space are tight?
The balance comes from understanding that rawness and precision are not opposites. In a score like Next to Normal, the rawness only really lands if the structure underneath it is secure.
The music is relentless. It demands stamina, accuracy, emotional intelligence and real trust between performers. If the cast are fighting the music technically, they cannot live inside the scene truthfully. So we have spent a lot of time treating the score as both music and text. The notes matter, the rhythms matter, but so does the thought underneath every phrase.
In rehearsal, I am interested in where the music interrupts normal behaviour. This is a domestic drama, but the score allows the pressure inside the family to erupt. Sometimes the music is what a character cannot say. Sometimes it is what they are trying not to know. Sometimes it is the speed of panic, or the force of memory, or the exhaustion of pretending.
The Fringe environment makes that more intense. You do not have endless time, endless space or endless technical resources. But that can also be clarifying. We have to ask what each moment is really about and strip away anything decorative. The Sanctuary at Paradise Green gives us an intimate relationship with the audience, so we do not need to push for scale all the time. The emotional size of the piece can come from focus.
My job is to create enough precision that the performers feel safe to be emotionally brave. If the staging, music and storytelling are held tightly, then the cast can risk more. Controlled does not mean cold. It means the production has a spine.
Next to Normal blends domestic realism with a high-energy rock score. What do you think this musical language allows you to express about mental health and family life that a more traditional score couldn’t?
The rock score allows the inner life of the family to become theatrical without becoming polite. That is crucial.
A more traditional score might risk smoothing the edges of the story. Next to Normal needs a musical language that can be jagged, obsessive, funny, furious, tender and overwhelming, sometimes within the same number. Mental health does not always move in clean emotional arcs. Family conflict does not always arrive in well-shaped sentences. The rock language gives the show volatility.
What I love is the collision between the ordinary and the extreme. This is a family in a house, dealing with school, marriage, doctors, dinner, birthdays, routines. But underneath that domestic surface, the emotional volume is huge. The score lets us hear that. It turns subtext into sound.
It also captures the way a family system can become rhythmic. People repeat patterns. They interrupt each other. They avoid the same subjects. They return to the same wounds. The music reflects that. It can feel like thought spiralling, memory returning, panic accelerating, or love trying to force its way through a blocked room.
For me, the score says that mental health and grief are not quiet subjects just because people often suffer quietly. Inside, they can be deafening. The rock score gives that inner noise a form.
If audiences leave the Sanctuary at Paradise Green talking about one social issue raised by your production, what do you hope it is, and why that one?
I hope they talk about the fact that care cannot sit solely inside one family.
That feels like the central social issue for me. The show is about mental health, grief, treatment and family, but underneath all of that is a question about where care is expected to happen, who is expected to provide it, and what happens when those people are already breaking.
The Goodman family are not untouched by support, but they are still profoundly alone in many ways. That loneliness is not just emotional. It is structural. It reflects how many people experience mental illness, bereavement and crisis: as something that becomes private very quickly, even when it is too big to be held privately.
If audiences leave talking about that, then the production has done something useful. Not because theatre should provide policy answers, but because theatre can make us feel the human cost of questions we sometimes discuss too abstractly. Who gets believed? Who gets supported? Who gets exhausted? Who disappears inside someone else’s crisis? Who is allowed to say they cannot cope?
I would love audiences to leave moved by the family, but also unsettled by the wider implications. The musical does not ask us simply to pity Diana, admire Dan, worry about Natalie or mourn what has happened to the Goodmans. It asks us to look at the whole ecosystem of care, silence, stigma and survival.
For me, that is why the piece still matters so much. It is not only asking, “How does one family heal?” It is asking, “What kind of world would make healing more possible?”
You can find out more about the show and buy tickets here
Steve Goldman has spent years rescuing the most bizarre, ill‑judged and unintentionally comic LP sleeves from the dustiest corners of vinyl history. His cult exhibition, The Worst Record Covers in the World, has delighted audiences everywhere from galleries to comedy festivals — and in 2026 it arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe. Ahead of the show’s run at Assembly George Square Studios, we caught up with Steve to talk design disasters, accidental folk art, and why these gloriously terrible sleeves still make us laugh. Full details and booking are available via the official Fringe listing. You can also check out Worst Record Covers Instagram.
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The Origin Story — You’ve said the whole thing began with Roadstar Peter Rabbit bought for 10p. Be honest: was that the moment you realised humanity had no aesthetic brakes, or the moment you realised you’d found your life’s work?
When it all began, 40 years ago I was just a whipper snapper and had no idea this would become my life’s work! I bought Peter Rabbit for 10p because it was such an extraordinarily bad cover. Subsequently I lost it. Then the internet came along, I thought “I’ll find it now”, but every time I typed in Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter links came up- and I thought I’d never see it again. Then about 10 years ago someone told me to look in discogs.com- so I did, and it came up straight away. It was a bit more expensive this time- £5, plus a fiver to have it shipped from Germany. When it arrived was one of the happiest moments of my life. And that evening I said to my family “do you know what, I think I’ll start collecting crap record covers”…. That’s the moment I realised I’d found a calling
The Stewart Lee Effect — Stewart Lee claims your collection made him “despair of humanity itself.” Do you take that as a compliment, a warning, or the highest possible endorsement?
When we created The Art of the Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve- the book of the exhibition- Stewart was kind enough to agree to write the foreword. (We actually asked three people- Stewart, Dolly Parton and the German singer King Sized Dick, and Stewart was the only one who bothered to reply) In Stewart’s foreword he does indeed say that the collection made him despair of humanity itself. He goes on to say that he “began to hate mankind for it’s ineffable and inexcusable shitness, its natural tendency towards ugliness and stupidity…”. And also that he began to hate me for my role in originating the project, and Simon Robinson, the author of the book. But he comes round, and by the end of the foreword he congratulates me and Simon on “Defining an as yet uncategorised new substrata of folk art”..which is the highest possible endorsement!
The Line Between Bad and Brilliant — You insist the covers must be unintentionally funny.What’sthe secret ingredient that turns a merely ugly sleeve into a transcendent act of artistic self‑sabotage?
There’s no one secret ingredient: there’s so many forms of bad. I attach 22 sleeves, each one I think is funny for a different reason…..
Curatorial Ethics — You avoid anything gory, sexist, racist or hateful. In a world where shock sells, is it harder to find “clean” badness than it is to find offensive badness?
Yes that’s certainly true. There is a lot of offensive badness about. But just take a look at the exhibition and the book and you’ll see there are many rich seams of ‘clean’ badness.
The Psychology of Failure — When you look at these sleeves, do you see incompetence, innocence, delusion, or something more tender — the human urge to create, even when weprobably shouldn’t?
I see all of those things, but look at the attached sleeves- there’s so much more to love!
The Fringe Audience —You’veshown this collection everywhere from Halifax to Leicester. What is it about Fringe audiences that makes them howl the loudest?
Ah, Fringe audiences are very lucky actually- they’re surrounded by a smorgasbord of people trying to make them happy. When we first exhibited in Huddersfield in 2021, we were just beginning to emerge from the Covid pandemic and people really needed a treat. The joy and release people experienced coming together in a room, howling with laughter at the music industry’s incompetence was a real tonic. It’s an absolute buzz to come to the fringe- this is our second year, and first year on George Square- but I’m also very tickled when the exhibition lights up places that are well and truly off the beaten track like Warrington, Birkenhead and Mansfield, where the full exhibition is this summer.
The Collector’s High — After 700 sleeves, what still gives you that electric jolt — the “oh God, what is this?” moment that tells you a new horror has earned its place?
There’s one rule- if it makes me laugh, then it’s in.
Design Crimes — Which design sin offends you the most: the floating disembodied head, the badlycut‑outfigure, the tragic attempt at sex appeal, or the “we’ll fix it in post” optimism that clearly never happened?
Actually they don’t offend me, they delight me! Yes, you’ve identified 4 themes there, but there’s so much more….. including ones where the design is just inexplicable.,
The Stroke, the Charity, the Mission —You’veturned a personal health crisis into a fundraising mission for Different Strokes. How does it feel to watch people laugh themselves silly while supporting something so serious?
Actually supporting Different Strokes was an afterthought suggested by my wife! But it’s raised over £3000 so far, and it’s made people realise that strokes aren’t exclusively suffered by the elderly. One in four strokes happen to people of working age, like me. Our needs, and the challenges we face are very different from people who have strokes later in life. We’ve launched Worst Record Covers in the World calendars for 2027 – I’m hoping if those sell well we can do a bit more to help Different Strokes.
The Philosophy of Bad Taste — At what point does bad taste stop being a joke and become a cultural archive — a record of who we were, what we thought looked good, and how magnificently wrong we often were?
At the moment when I thought of exhibiting The Worst Record Covers in the World!
Best in Class returns to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2026 as one of the festival’s most vital and talked‑about platforms for working‑class comedians. Founded by Sian Davies after confronting the financial and social barriers that routinely shut out performers from less privileged backgrounds, the project has grown from a single crowdfunded showcase into a movement that trains, supports, and champions working‑class talent across the UK. Their Fringe shows have become a daily sell‑out phenomenon, celebrated for bringing fresh voices to a festival still dominated by middle‑ and upper‑class acts . With award‑winning momentum behind them — including the Edinburgh Comedy Awards Panel Prize and multiple grants supporting their work — Best in Class arrives at Fringe 2026 with a renewed mission: to platform performers who deserve to be heard and to challenge the systemic inequalities that shape the comedy industry
1. Working‑class barriers — The Fringe keeps getting more expensive and more corporate. From where you’re standing, what’s the most invisible barrier working‑class comedians still face that middle‑class audiences never notice?
The biggest barrier is still financial, but two other huge factors are contacts and knowledge.Many working-class comedians simply don’t have the same networks as people who grew up around the arts. They might not know the right people to ask for advice, where to find opportunities, or even what opportunities exist in the first place.A lot of that knowledge gets passed around informally, so if you’re not already in those circles it can be much harder to access. That’s one of the things Best in Class tries to help with. We want our acts to experience the Fringe, build connections, gain confidence and learn how the industry works, so they can take those opportunities forward into the rest of their careers.
2. Funding the Fringe — Best in Class is proudly crowdfunded and profit‑sharing. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about who does and doesn’t put their money behind working‑class talent?
We’re always incredibly grateful for every donation, whatever the size.One of the most encouraging things this year has been seeing support from some really well-known and established comedians. It’s lovely to know that people who are further along in their careers believe in what we’re doing and want to help the next generation of working-class talent.More broadly, it’s been really heartening to see support come from all sorts of places. Every year we’re reminded that there are lots of people across the comedy industry and beyond who genuinely want to help make opportunities more accessible.
3. Talent pipeline — You’ve built a showcase that’s become a launchpad. What’s the moment you realised Best in Class wasn’t just a show but a counter‑culture talent engine?
It’s hard to choose one particular moment, because we’re lucky enough to see lots of small (and occasionally very big!) wins.Whether it’s spotting one of our alumni on TV, hearing them on the radio, seeing them tour a full show, or watching them get opportunities they might not otherwise have had, those moments are always a real source of pride.
For us, that’s what Best in Class is all about: helping talented working-class comedians take the next step in their careers and showing just how much incredible talent is out there.
4. Class on stage — How do you navigate the line between representing working‑class life and being expected to perform it for a largely middle‑class festival audience?
As comedians, we’re used to sharing our lives on stage. That can feel quite vulnerable for anyone, regardless of their background.
The brilliant thing about comedy is that audiences connect with honesty. While our acts bring their own experiences and perspectives to the stage, they’re not there to represent an entire class or community. They’re there to tell funny, personal stories.
What we’ve found is that great comedy resonates with audiences from all backgrounds. The specifics of a story might be different, but the emotions and experiences behind it are often surprisingly universal.
5. The 2026 line‑up — This year’s acts range from vaudeville chaos to dark self‑deprecation to political storytelling. What unites this line‑up beyond class background?
This year’s line-up all share values that really align with Best in Class: a strong work ethic, a willingness to support one another, and the determination to pursue their goals despite the barriers they may face.
We’re also passionate about building a sense of community. Best in Class has never just been about putting on a show; it’s about creating a network where comedians can learn from each other, champion each other and grow together.
This year’s cohort is a fantastic example of that spirit, and we’re incredibly proud to be working with them.
6. Comedy industry inequality — If you could change one structural thing about the UK comedy industry tomorrow to make it fairer, what would it be?
It’s a big one, but fees.
We all understand that rising costs affect everyone, from venues and promoters to audiences and performers. But comedy simply wouldn’t exist without comedians, and performance fees haven’t increased at the same rate as many other costs.
If we could change one thing, we’d love to see comedians paid more fairly for their work. Even small things like travel expenses can make a huge difference, particularly for newer acts who are often paying significant costs upfront just to get on stage and build their careers.
7. Fringe economics — The Fringe loves to market itself as “the world’s biggest open‑access arts festival”. From your perspective, how true is that slogan in 2026?
The Edinburgh Fringe is still one of the most exciting and accessible arts festivals in the world in many ways, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people without financial backing to take part.
Like much of the arts sector, rising costs have had a significant impact, and those challenges are often felt most acutely by people from working-class backgrounds.
We’d love to see more meaningful conversations about how performers can access the festival if they don’t have a financial safety net. The more people who are able to take part, the richer and more representative the Fringe becomes.
8. Bursaries and impact — Your bursaries now help working‑class comedians bring full shows to the Fringe. What’s the most powerful transformation you’ve seen from someone who received support?
One of the most rewarding things we see is a real increase in confidence.
For many of our acts, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe is something they’ve never imagined would be possible. Once they’re there, meeting other artists, performing their work and seeing audience reactions, they begin to realise that they absolutely deserve to be part of it.
That shift in mindset can be incredibly powerful. We regularly hear from alumni about how much the experience helped their confidence, opened new opportunities and encouraged them to aim higher in their careers.
9. Comedy and identity — Several acts this year talk openly about disability, neurodivergence, sexuality, or cultural heritage. How do you create a space where those stories can be told without being commodified?
We don’t ask people to talk about any particular aspect of their identity. The comedians we work with are selected because they’re talented, funny and have something interesting to say.
If an act wants to talk about disability, neurodivergence, sexuality, cultural heritage or any other part of their life, that’s entirely their choice. We want people to feel able to tell the stories that matter to them, in whatever way feels authentic.
Ultimately, our role is to create a supportive environment where comedians can be themselves. We trust our acts to decide what they want to share with audiences and how they want to share it.
10. Future of Best in Class — If Best in Class had unlimited funding and zero constraints, what’s the radical version of the project you’d build next?
If funding and resources were no object, we’d love to support more working-class comedians at every stage of their careers.
That could mean more bursaries, more training and mentoring opportunities, regional showcases across the UK, industry networking events, and year-round development programmes rather than focusing primarily on the Edinburgh Fringe.
Ultimately, we’d love to build a sustainable pipeline of support, helping talented comedians access opportunities, develop their skills and progress their careers, regardless of their financial background or where they live.
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.
Roland in Hunger
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.
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.
Poppy Radcliffe in conversation with Pat Harrington
How do you hold a system to account while it’s holding you? That’s the question pulsing beneath SECTIONED – Schrödinger’s Mental Health, the raw, poetic, and politically charged solo show from neurodiverse performer Poppy Radcliffe. In it, Radcliffe takes the audience on an unflinching journey through nine years of coercive psychiatric intervention—including eight sectionings, the most recent of which occurred just weeks before this year’s Fringe.
Blending slam poetry with sharp commentary, she takes a scalpel to a system that asks patients to be simultaneously unwell enough to detain yet well enough to self-manage. The “Schrödinger” metaphor, far from a gimmick, becomes a lived paradox—a way to interrogate the cruel logic of mental health bureaucracy where diagnosis justifies surveillance and vulnerability is met with suspicion.
Here, Poppy speaks candidly about the trauma of being detained, the institutional failures she’s endured, and her hopes for poetic protest as a catalyst for reform. In this moving and urgent interview, she lays bare the contradictions of a system that claims to care, but too often punishes, isolates, and invalidates. What follows is both testimony and artistic mission statement—one that may well leave you changed.
About the Show and Creative Approach
What inspired the title SECTIONED – Schrödinger’s Mental Health, and how does the quantum metaphor shape both the narrative arc and audience experience?
The title Schrödinger’s Mental Health is a reference to two things being true at the same time. When dealing with the mental health services, it often feels like you are expected to be both well and ill simultaneously. You are expected to accept life long ill health and medication but act calmer and more together than people without diagnosis. If one is well why can’t there even be consideration to reduce medication? If one is ill, why do you get no practical support?
The show asks the question: am I ill or am I well, because I surely can’t be both?
You describe the piece as part crushing poetry and part TED talk. How do you balance raw, confessional verse with the more structured, informational elements?
This is one of my favourite aspects of the show. The show transitions smoothly from the prose parts to the poetry, with the poems chosen to highlight the emotional impact of the policies on the patient, there is no stop and start between them.
Your debut show was shortlisted as “best emerging artist” at Brighton and won Best Neurodiverse Performance. How has that early recognition influenced your creative process this year?
It has certainly given me confidence that the show will be well received. Writing this show has been incredibly difficult, it is a scary thing to stand up and say that a system that is universally loved and believed to be doing the best they can is in fact failing as many people as it helps. Winning the outstanding neurodiverse performance award at Brighton was an honor and a shock, until I received the nomination, I wasn’t even aware that any awards people had seen the show. It made me feel that there really was a chance that the show and story could get noticed at Edinburgh this year, which is both everything I want and also terrifying as the thought of being the face of mental ill health in the UK brings its own level of anxiety.
Anxiety that got so high that my most recent sectioning was between Brighton and Edinburgh 2025. I had to take the mental health services to a tribunal (independent legal process to determine whether I should be released from section) in order to get released in time to perform at the fringe this year. A tribunal I won and I am very proud of that as apparently that is rare. In a weird way I am grateful that I had recent experience of a ward, it had been 2.5 years since I was last in and it is easy to forget the horror, but if anything they are worse than they ever were.
It has thrown into contrast the general public perception of myself and the perception of the services, the former seeming to have faith and the latter, that I am only trying to help, still doubting my sanity.
Talking Sectioning and Inpatient Care
You’ve been sectioned eight times in nine years. Can you walk us through the most jarring moments during the AMHP and medical assessments—what questions or procedures stay with you?
My first sectioning and last sectionings were the most jarring. The first happened three months after the separation from my husband at a time when I felt as mentally well as I have ever done. I slipped up, over did things and got arrested for drunk and disorderly, not my finest moment but in my view understandable given the circumstances and it was the first time ever in my life. When I left the cell the next morning, the second lieutenant said to me “Don’t worry, a lot of people who go on to do amazing things have records for drunk and disorderly”. I felt seen, supported and ready to repay their faith in me by buckling down and working.
I got sectioned two days later after nothing more than a row with my parents who didn’t know how to handle the arrest. In that meeting, and it was until recently the only one that I had seen the section notes of, I was called delusional for believing I could build a database (my area of expertise), they commented that my speak was laboured when talking about my parents, people who had broken a promise and with whom I had always had a difficult relationship. At the time I was a satellite engineer, I may have used the term “rocket scientist” a slight exaggeration. The section notes wrote there were “elements of truth”. I felt that they saw a distressed woman and formed their own conclusions when there was nothing at that point to be worried about. That decision was the start of my mental distress, not the culmination of it.
In general, I could not tell you what parts hurt the most because I have not been given access to what they have written about me, you are almost periphery to the decision process about your own future.
The most recent sectioning hurt because prior to it, I had spent a week trying to get myself voluntarily committed. I called an ambulance on myself 8 times, because I was so mentally unwell that it was also physically ill, an interconnect between my mental and physical health now being something I deal with on a daily basis. The ambulance came 5 times and each time wrote me a note, saying “Talk to your sister” or on one “If you experience unconsciousness, dial 999” which is impossible advice and then left without me. I honestly thought I was going to die and they left me and only sectioned me after I had recovered my strength. Yes I damaged church property, but if I committed a crime whilst psychotic then charge me with a crime and allow me to tell my side of the story. It is not right to lock people up with no ability to advocate for themselves.
Mind’s guide to sectioning stresses the right to an interpreter, a friend present, and full explanations of each stage. Which of these rights did you find most critical in preserving your dignity, and where did the system fall short?
None of these were offered for any of my admissions, I was not even aware until this interview that I had a right to have a friend with me at the assessment phase and have never done so. The explanations for the treatment tend to amount to “We believe you need medication” but no explanation given to what exactly they believe they are treating.
I can not think of any way that the system has not failed, nearly all actions in my life that sound shameful were during the sectioning process at first admission to a ward.
Looking back at your ward admissions, which practical changes—big or small—would have transformed a punitive experience into a genuinely therapeutic one?
The key thing I would change would be the welcome. Arriving at a ward is scary, no one greats you. You are just dumped and left to wait. It’s a minor change but if you were met by a nurse and given a cup of tea and taken to a quiet place to talk and have the rules of the ward explained to you, I think this could do wonders to transform the experience. The first time I was in a ward, I had my phone confiscated after putting a post on Facebook trying to track down a woman’s partner. She had been picked up and taken with no notice and no ability to get a message, believing he may have thought she just left, she was desperate to reach him. I thought I was doing a good thing, no one had explained to me that you weren’t allowed to post publicly about patients and for doing so they confiscated my phone, my only link to normality. It was just hours after this that the first signs of psychosis occurred in my mind. Something I had never experienced before I was sectioned that first time.
So give a proper explanation and tour.
Also the way they deal with medication is atrocious. You go into a ward and are handed small pots of pills to take throughout the day, you are often not even told what they are or what they are supposed to be treating. Medication can be transformative is done right, my sister is the poster child for the positive effects of the right medication, but in wards they do not listen to you when you say that the pills they are giving you are not right. People in mental wards are not stupid, they are the ones with lived experience of the medication, believe them and listen to them about what they are struggling with and try different meds with their agreement until you find something that actually works. Nobody wants to be chaotic, no one wants to be in distress. The arrival of the mental health services should feel like the cavalry has arrived, in reality it often feels like shelling from the enemy.
Systemic Reflections and Remedies
You argue that a successful service is one that makes itself redundant. From your research and lived experience, what three concrete tweaks to acute inpatient wards would most accelerate that goal?
1: Believe what the patients are telling you. You do not end up in a mental ward because you have a supportive family and good people around you. In my most recent admission I was called delusional for believing in the threat to my wellbeing from my neighbours, a very real threat. Even if they seem far fetched, start from a place of trust.
2. Make the services point of contact, make it easy for someone to self refer, have a more GP like system for appointment, mental health does not occur on a regular monthly basis, if a crisis happens, they must respond quickly. Conversely don’t force people to appointments when they have nothing that they need to discuss.
3. Make people create recovery plans as well as crisis plans. The services always insist you make a crisis plan for what they should do in an emergency. It forces you to think about the past and your ill health and then, at least in my case when a crisis hits, is not followed anyway. There is currently no concept of a recovery plan. Allow people to think about a positive future, allow them to define the steps they need to take to experience good mental health again. The mind is an incredibly malleable organ, the viewset that once you become ill, you will always be ill is in my opinion not only wrong but self fulfilling. If you do not have positive encouragement from friends and family, you need it from the services and this is something they currently don’t provide.
In preparing the show you must have come across pockets of best practice. Which trusts or units seemed closest to “care that empowers recovery,” and what lessons do they offer?
The most positive thing I experienced in a ward was one ward that held weekly patient and staff feedback meetings where you could give your opinion on what had been good and bad the previous week and what you would like to see going forward. There was also a particular nurse one time who always seemed genuinely pleased to see me and was always available for a chat and who even came in on her day off because it was the day I was being released just to say goodbye. Her kindness has stuck with me to this day.
Underfunding and staffing shortages are chronic issues. How might frontline practitioners advocate for incremental improvements—say, in ward layout or daily routine—that cost little but yield outsized benefits?
They say they are understaffed but there are loads of staff on the wards they just sit around. We do not need more staff, they need to change the way the staff are trained and the processes they have to follow. Staff sitting around all day just watching the patients does nothing. I once saw a nurse on 1 to 1 sitting by and watching a patient hitting her head against the wall till it bled. There is a never ending stream of people wanting to work in mental health, let them actually help.
Neurodiversity, Performance, and Stigma
Winning the neurodiverse performance award at Brighton Fringe must have felt momentous. How has that validation shaped the way you frame the show’s themes for audiences unfamiliar with neurodiversity?
I touch on the topic of my autism during the show and indeed it is the autistic neurodiversity that I most associate with. At the time it was given and to some extent, to this day, I am very uneasy with the bipolar diagnosis that I also have. It is a very common misdiagnosis for autism. I try to show the positives of autism, I was a natural at maths and physics in my youth and I liked my honesty. As I say in the show, I fail to see how an intense interest in subjects and difficulty lying can be considered negative traits and not attributes to aspire to.
You’re reaching people who’ve never spent a night on a psychiatric ward. How do you tailor your language and imagery so that lived-experience audiences feel seen, while newcomers remain engaged without feeling overwhelmed?
I focus on a few key moments in the process, particularly on the initial greeting and the overwhelming boredom that is the most prevalent emotion in the wards. The poetry adds depth to the descriptions as they are poems that were written at the times of the stories so show the emotional impact. I am trying to show that wards don’t often feel like places of recovery but places where distress is exacerbated by a system that says it cares but where the staff tend to seem aloof and disparaging, which is the opposite of what someone going through trauma needs. There are good sides, the craft groups that are sadly becoming rarer especially providing some respite to the monotony.
Performance art can crack through stigma in ways policy papers never will. What moments in the show do you think resonate most in shifting public empathy?
This is a tricky one, I think the most impactful poem in the show is one called help
Don’t tell me that you’re helping
When your help is nothing thus………….
Don’t tell me you don’t see them
The hopeless, disenchanted mass………
I’m hoping that this will encourage people to open their eyes. The same actions with different motivations can be good or bad. That we live in a society now that seems to support the bullies and those that shout loudest rather than the gentle and those trying to obey the laws. There are thousands of people struggling and when the care criticises and leaves you alone it does less good than kind words and practical assistance.
I have tried to make the show as light as possible but I hope it shocks people into realising that the “care” provided by the acute services is very different to that provided for less intensive situations and that there is a significant difference to receiving help you have requested than having help you don’t necessarily want thrust upon you
Just let me lick my wounds in peace
And somehow make it through at least .
Future Directions and Impact
You’ve said that after Edinburgh you want to use your birth name, Robyn, and move into standup comedy. How do you envision translating your poetic confessions into a comedic set—what stays, what goes?
The poetry and standup I think will become separate. I love poetry but social reform is really what I’m aiming for. My recent poetry is much lighter than the stuff included in the show, in part because my mindset is much lighter now. I have one called “we’re doing AI backwards” which is a piece about wanting AI to help me search and categorise existing human made art rather than create art for me and I even wrote my first love poem a few months ago. I’ve signed up for a comedy course starting in October. I do not know yet how successful it will be but I’ve done a lot of absurd things in my struggle to survive and I hope to uplift people by being vocal about the rubbish I have done and showing that the past is not the future. We all deserve a fresh start.
Of course if Edinburgh goes well, I will consider touring this show, I hope to do a London date in the autumn.
Beyond moving seats in Laughing Horse’s Little Cellar, what change in policy or public mindset would you love this show to catalyze over the next year?
I want to blow the doors off the whole system, though I know this can not be done in a year. There is a brilliant book called Fragile Minds by a mental health nurse called Bella Jackson who sees the same problems that I see with judgement, disbelief and lack of care. I’m hoping together we can start a movement for reform.
I am also hoping to get actively involved as an expert by experience or peer worker within the wards, my dream is to run poetry groups within wards and within time to publish and anthology called “Poetry from the wards” to show the world that many of the people detained in mental wards are gentle, good people trying to get their lives back on track.
If you could pose one urgent question—about rights, resources, recovery—to a mental health commissioner, what would you ask, and what would your ideal answer sound like?
Good question.
Why are there more opportunities for convicts in prison to upskill and start again than there are patients in mental wards?
My ideal answer would be:
Many people in wards are only there for short periods, (but this is not true, many people are there for 6 months going onto years). I would like them to recognise that heavy sedative medication prevents people from really engaging in meaningful recovery, to acknowledge the empty craft and therapy rooms and suggest that a move towards more holistic therapy and practical help and guidance could have better results.
Edy Hurst’s Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Himself is a gleefully chaotic, deeply personal comedy-theatre show that blends Lancashire witch trial lore and the irresistible pull of the Vengaboys into one spellbound hour of storytelling. Counter Culture wanted to know more about the Edinburgh Fringe 2025 showso we asked Edy.
Your show leaps from witch trials to the Vengaboys via ADHD—how did those threads first collide in your mind?
Well look, a lot of people keep saying ADHD is a big part of the show, but let me nip that in the bud. This is simply a show about the Lancashire Witch Trials, and also how the Vengaboys secretly made a concept album where they circumnavigate the globe, and nothing else.
Was I diagnosed with ADHD just before I started making the show? Sure. Does it make me find patterns in things that, at first, might appear disparate and unrelated? Perhaps. Do I go on about it all the time? Not on this watch!
There’s something anarchic about remixing history with Europop. Are you reclaiming joy as resistance?
Well that makes me feel like I’m doing something important so thank you!
I think joy is probably always an act of resistance, and to prioritise that is to welcome surprise and connection into your life, you don’t get to find it where you plan to, and it’s not something that can be measured or quantified, but it’s one of the greatest feelings you get on earth.
And because it’s joyful, and because you’re hoping to bring people along on your journey of exploration, you’re reminding yourselves that you need to be open and willing and take risks and to think about the world in a different way.
To consider that maybe our preconceived notions that cheesy dance song could be held as an insight into a time and a place in the same way as historical accounts are is both accepting the madness of our reality and the ridiculousness of the world we find ourselves in.
That, but also it’s a daft laugh, and you know what? We don’t have a lot, but we have a laugh don’t we?
What drew you to witch trials specifically? Is it the hysteria, the misdiagnosis, or something deeper about who gets punished for being ‘too much’?
One of the seeds of the show is that my mum told me we were related to some of the women accused in the Lancashire Witch Trials, so everything about the Pendle Witches and the Lancashire Witch Trials kind of came out of that.
Growing up in the North and always being interested in folklore and fantasy, they’re events that I think are really easy to romanticise despite the fact all our knowledge comes from what were at the time legitimate but problematic court documents.
The more research you do the more you find out what a complicated set of philosophical and political circumstances led to these people being accused, and how the decisions documented there led to wider witch trials, and where the turning point of someone being a ‘cunning folk’ that practices magic at the request of the community to becoming a Witch is.
Like so many things in the past it’s really tempting for people to put their own view points on what it actually meant, without there being much more than a single document of information. Something I’ve been very aware of making the show is that to create work about witch trials is to create something that directly addresses real people, unlike Dracula, Frankenstein or other staples of horror there was a genuine impact in the stories we told of witchcraft, and I think that there’s some level of responsibility you carry with that.
A responsibility just as great as knowing that the vengaboys made a concept album where they learnt to circumnavigate the globe but nobody has noticed except me.
(Some folks who I’d really recommend for additional reading is Thomas Waters Cursed Britain, Owen Davies Cunning Folk and Ronald Sutton’s The Witch.)
ADHD shapes your storytelling—not just the content but the rhythm, the pace, the tangents. How do audiences respond to that kind of honesty?
That’s really interesting to think of it as honesty! And you’re right, I think it’s something that I can’t not do, it constantly betrays or conveys my thought process even if I’m not talking about specific events or occurrences from my life.
I really like trying to do things I haven’t done before, or I haven’t seen done on stage. Part of the privilege of getting to perform for me is that you should try and creatively push both you and your audience’s experiences. Having said that, one of the things about trying something new is that it’s uncharted territory, and audiences need to feel comfortable that in taking a risk they will be rewarded, or the journey is worth that walk.
I think the audience response is often quite dependent on the context I’m in. For my own shows where an audience knows they’re coming for a particular topic told by someone with a particular image, they should have a good idea of what to expect before they walk in.
Whereas at a comedy club I’m one part of a mix of acts, and so as a musical comedian who does lots of different types of energies and paces in a set, it’s often about quickly showing that I also know that I am often a contrast to the other acts, but that it’s fine. It’s better than fine! It’s Great!
I guess it boils down to in the club context “It’s weird; I like it” and in the show context “I like it;it’s weird” or at least hopefully. Not everyone likes everything, and I think that is quite frankly very rude.
You’ve said that the Vengaboys are the sonic embodiment of “weird hope.” What does that mean in the context of your show?
That does sound like something I’ve said, and I shall add it to the worrying list of ‘things people have said I said that aren’t bad things to have said but I have no recollection of saying.’
I think the Vengaboys are a very fun celebration of difference without you realising it,. This was in the show and was dropped because there wasn’t enough time but “Boom Boom Boom Boom” is a celebration of female sexual agency that was released at a time when female pop stars weren’t often given that level of respect, whilst at the same time being a fun campy dance song.
It’s music that is catchy and, for late 90s early 00s euro-dance, doesn’t out stay it’s welcome, which I think is partly why they’re still a successful touring band to this day. I also think that their songs are easy to see as light
Fringe can be overwhelming at the best of times—how do you navigate performing with neurodivergence in a festival environment like this?
Comedy’s had a big reckoning with labels, diagnoses, identity. Are you part of a wave that’s doing away with shame?
Would you rather be tried as a witch or spend eternity on the Vengabus?
Ahhhh yes, much like the trolley problem, it is the perennial question, whether to buy a ticket to the Vengabus or sit in the dock armed with a broomstick. It’s a choice that haunts me. On the one hand, the Vengabus is a great mode of transport in an intercity disco. On the other hand, everybody’s jumping, and that could be stressful. Then on the other other hand, being tried as a witch is the absolute pits. Vengabus 100%
What’s the audience reaction you cherish most? Confusion, catharsis, or just boogying in their seat?
There’s a pretty recent interview Donald Glover (Childish Gambino) did where he talks about some advice he got from Erykah Badu. He’s worried about how his audience will feel about his new album and asks Erykah if she ever feels that and tells him “I make what I like, and they eat it how they want to eat it.”
I’ll be honest, I’m just grateful out of all the shows and experiences on earth they chose to spend an hour watching something I’m making, and hilst I hope that they enjoy and get out of what I’m trying to convey, it’s pretty fucking cool they turned up at all.
If we were to set your show to a trial of its own—what’s the closing argument you’d make in its defence?
Hey now! What’s the show on trial for? What’s its crime? Enjoying a meal? A succulent Chinese meal? If that’s the case, lock me up and throw away my keys, that sounds delicious.
Pat Harrington asked Daniel Macdonald about his fascinating play Iago Speaks performing at the Edinburgh Fringe 2025.
1. What first inspired you to pick up Iago’s story immediately after Othello, and how did that spark relate to your interest in language and silence?
Iago is one of the few Shakespearean villains, if not the only villain, who does not die at the end of the play and who is simply carted off with the promise that he will be tortured. I started to muse about what that might mean. Was he just languishing in a prison cell somewhere? The problem was that I was intent on writing a comedy but somehow using Iago as the catalyst for the story.
2. How did you arrive at the idea of pairing Iago with his traditionally silent Jailer as a comedy duo that interrogates power through speech and its absence?
The contrast between the two characters was the ultimate tool or weapon I used to explore language. By their nature, they most likely would use language very differently. And so this comedic motif of having a sense of miscommunication became one of my sources for comedy in the play.
3. In practical terms, what challenges did you face writing and staging a character bound by a vow of silence, and how did those constraints shape Iago’s arc?
My own question as a playwright was about how long I would keep Iago silent? And was this intentionally going to be a plot point in the play? In other words, is Iago ever going to speak? Well, the play is called Iago Speaks and so it is not meant to be a surprise that eventually he does speak. It is more about the how and why he speaks that became interesting to me. And this is all as a result of the presence/existence of his Jailer.
4. The press release calls the play “a profound exploration of its own art form.” How do you balance laugh-out-loud comedy with moments of meta-theatrical reflection on words and storytelling?
I’m not sure. It just works. Mainly it works because The Jailer is somehow slightly aware that he is part of something else that he is not quite able to identify. He is searching for a purpose as to why he is even there in the first place. In my play, The Jailer represents a sort of everyman character who keeps showing up in other Shakespearean tragedies with nothing to do except to hold a spear. But even then, he feels he is useful. But with Iago in this dungeon cell there seems to be no purpose to his function at all. And this raises further questions for him.
5. Early audiences in Saskatoon and Winnipeg praised the show’s absurdity. Did their feedback prompt you to sharpen the themes of nonverbal communication and unspoken motives?
Not really. Mainly any rewrites I did we’re focused on new discoveries around playfulness and silences without extending the play but in fact rather tightening it at any opportunity.
6. The Jailer’s quest to “make a name for himself” drives an existential thread. How did you weave questions of identity and purpose into the play’s humour and tension?
We know what Iago’s purpose is. He is simply a collection of characteristics created by a playwright. I was, in some ways, intent on maintaining his character, his essence, in the way we understand it. But the jailer? He is an anonymous nobody. A tabula rasa. He, on the other hand, admires Iago for his purpose, his singular intent, and his ability with language. The Jailer, at least in his own mind, has none of this and so decides to, in some way, emulate Iago.
9. How do staged silences, carefully timed pauses, and physical gestures serve to heighten suspense and underscore hidden truths?
They primarily serve the purpose of creating a sense of emptiness; a void of nothingness where nothing seems to be what it is and nothing is happening. What I hope this does is allow the audience to begin to empathize with The Jailer and his longing for something to happen; for something “dramatic” to occur. Finally, I think it begins to motivate The Jailer to take some action on his own.
11. For Fringe audiences unfamiliar with Othello, how do you ensure the thematic stakes around language’s power and the weight of silence remain clear?
You do not have to know anything about Shakespeare, Othello or Iago to love and understand the play. The Jailer takes care of all of this for us. In addition, the play is not really so connected to Shakespeare’s Othello that we need to know or understand that story. We know all we need to know though what information The Jailor provides.
12. When Iago finally breaks his vow, that single utterance carries enormous weight. How did you craft that moment to maximize its thematic resonance?
It is not that Iago finally speaks that is significant. It is why he speaks that makes all the difference in the play and in how we come to understand The Jailer.
13. The play frequently winks at Shakespeare and breaks the fourth wall. How do these meta-theatrical moments shape our understanding of the theatrical process itself?
There is some attempt in the play to breakdown some of the pretense that lives in theatre. The collapse of the 4th wall is again a way to explore and have fun with the very nature of what theatre is and ultimately what the audience’s role is in it.
14. With dialogue partially stripped away, lighting, sound design, and movement become crucial. How did you employ these elements to convey subtext and emotion?
While sound elements are sparsely used in the play, the sounds that are used are key elements in giving us a sense of a meta-theatrical, otherworldly nature to the story. That is all I can say about that without starting to give away spoilers.
16. Rumpus is committed to new voices. How does Iago Speaks reflect your ethos of nurturing emerging talent while challenging theatrical conventions?
As a playwright I have always been keen on helping to develop new voices in playwriting. In fact, I am the coordinator and dramaturge for a theatre company in Saskatoon with a program literally called New Voices. I get excited when I read fresh and insightful writing from an emerging playwright. There simply is this desire to help them along. I feel I have insights to offer, both as a professional playwright, and a former teacher at the secondary and post-secondary levels. This element of Rumpus is my desire to continue this practice of giving back in any way I can.
17. During rehearsals, what unexpected thematic discoveries about the power or fragility of language emerged and shifted the play’s direction?
Showing rather than telling is always a key element in great writing. Much of my discovery in rehearsals and workshops was in new understandings around how little I had to “tell” in order for us to understand and appreciate the story.
18. The play’s tight 75-minute structure feels deliberate. How does this concentrated format reinforce themes of control, interruption, and narrative compression?
The play is actually probably more comfortable around the 85 minutes but has been trimmed in small ways to accommodate our 90 minute time slot at The Space UK – which always includes set-up and tear down. That said, very little has been lost or compromised in order to make the play a little more “Fringe.”
19. Beyond Fringe, how do you envision Iago Speaks evolving—perhaps in new venues or formats—to further explore language, identity, and complicity?
I am particularly interested in design elements that may illuminate new characteristics of the play that as yet have not been discovered. There are most likely a wide variety of directions new productions could go in this regard. But, as a comedy it really does have to remain true to its essence related to language and timing and so much of that will remain consistent no matter what. And while the two actors are brilliant in the production, it would be interesting, at some point, to see what another Iago/Jailer combo might do.
20. Finally, what core insight or lingering question about the power of language and the weight of silence do you hope every audience member takes away?
Ultimately, what I would hope audiences take away is a sense that, in some ways, they see themselves as The Jailer, asking the same questions of Shakespeare, theatre, and life that The Jailer asks. But mostly, I just want them to have a really good time in a theatre, watching a play. My ultimate goal was to write a fun romp of a comedy; something that allows us to forget get the state of the world right now for perhaps a few minutes. So much of theatre these days is steeped in earnestness and causes and while much of that is important and of value, to me the greatness of theatre is always in its magic and its fun.
Ahead of the Edinburgh Fringe, Pat Harrington interviewed Stuart Thomas about his show Bad Fatty.
1. What inspired you to create Bad Fatty? Lots of things! I’ve always wanted to do my own show at Edinburgh, and I’ve been slowly edging toward it ever since I started a Trello board of joke ideas during lockdown. During that same period, I took an online comedy course run by Sofie Hagen—an Edinburgh Comedy Award Best Newcomer winner. Sofie is a proud fat activist and a huge influence on my comedy. After lockdown, I was lucky enough to be invited to perform in a show with them called Sofie Hagen and Her Sexy Friends. That night, I tried out a fairly new joke about being a Bad Fatty, and it went down really well. It felt like the idea had legs—and more importantly, like it could be the kind of strong, catchy title I could build my first show around.
2. The title Bad Fatty is pretty provocative. What does being a “bad fatty” mean to you? I came across a piece that talked about how, within the fat acceptance community, there’s this unspoken divide between so-called “good fatties” and “bad fatties.” In simple terms, a good fatty is someone who’s actively trying to lose weight—apologising for their body, promising transformation, always striving to be smaller. A bad fatty, on the other hand, isn’t trying to shrink themselves. They’re just… existing. Eating in public without shame. Wearing what they want. Taking up space without permission. And I thought—yeah, that’s me. I’m the “bad” kind. So instead of hiding from that label, I decided to grab it with both hands and run with it.
3. Can you share a fatphobic absurdity you’ve spun into comedy? Of course! One of my favourite bits is about the people who genuinely believe that clothing brands shouldn’t make clothes for fat people—like that’s a valid stance. You’ll see them in comment sections or on daytime TV, ranting about how catering to larger bodies somehow “encourages obesity,” as if a pair of trousers has the power to ruin society. But here’s what they never seem to consider: if you don’t make clothes for fat people… what exactly is the alternative? Because the only logical outcome of their argument is more nude fat people in public. And if that’s what they want, they should just say it. Honestly, it’s giving “We fear you, but we also want to see your arse at Tesco.” I hope audiences realise that by laughing at these absurdities, maybe their assumptions about fat people aren’t all that true—and maybe they should at least question them.
4. How do you tackle diet culture in your act? Open mocking, to be honest. That’s the most straightforward way to describe how I deal with diet culture—I can’t take it seriously, and I absolutely refuse to pretend I do. To me, diet culture is one of the most absurd, joyless institutions we’ve built—worse than Good Morning Britain. It’s an entire industry designed to make you feel broken so it can sell you the illusion of being “fixed.” When you strip away the branding and the buzzwords, it’s just capitalism with a side of lettuce. And that’s just funny.
5. Have you always been this confident joking about your body? Not at all. For me, joking about being fat started as a defence mechanism. It was survival. You either make fun of yourself or get made fun of—and if I was the one telling the joke, at least I was holding the mic. That felt like power, even when everything else didn’t. I was the opposite of confident growing up. I got bullied quite a bit—which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly shocking. I was a fat, queer, nerdy kid with glasses from a sheep farm. That’s basically catnip for a school bully. But comedy changed a lot for me. It gave me a way to reshape the narrative—to say, “You don’t get to laugh at me unless I invite you in.” That, and a fair bit of therapy (though no prizes for guessing which is cheaper).
6. Sheep farm, working-class roots – how’d that shape Bad Fatty? Farming was all I knew for the first 18 years of my life. The farm wasn’t just a home—it was a full-on lifestyle, a business, and a chaotic family whirlwind of hard work and sheep poo. It shaped everything: my work ethic, my humour, my knowledge of obscure sheep breeds. Growing up working-class in that kind of environment meant you developed a thick skin early—especially when your mum’s version of body positivity was, “Eat up, that lamb is so fresh it was in that field this morning.” For years, I swore I’d never do a job that blurred the lines between life and work. And now I do stand-up comedy—a job that is a lifestyle, is chaotic, and definitely doesn’t stop when you clock out. So… great job, Stuart. Nailed it. But honestly? That upbringing taught me resilience, perspective, and how to find laughter even in the bleakest times. And all of that feeds directly into Bad Fatty.
7. How does bisexuality play into Bad Fatty? I think my confidence around being fat and being bisexual have taken turns holding each other up—like they’ve been tag-teaming my self-worth. I only came out as bi during lockdown—late bloomer energy—but I’ve been fat for much longer, so I had a head start on learning how to exist outside of what’s considered “acceptable.” There’s a real overlap in how both identities get treated. People erase you, question your legitimacy, or act like you owe them an explanation just for existing. So when I joke about being bi, it’s not just about sexuality—it’s about what it means to live in a body or identity that people constantly want to edit or shrink.
8. Fat, queer, Welsh, mentally ill—how does it all mesh on stage? It’s like a big cultural lasagna: every layer’s a struggle, but it’s flavourful. It might surprise people just how much crossover there is between these identities. Each one comes with its own stereotypes, social baggage, and survival strategies—and when you stack them, the overlap is wild. Fatphobia, queerphobia, classism, mental health stigma… they all come from the same joyless place that tells people they’re wrong for just existing as they are.
9. Mental health in comedy—how do you make depression funny? In a way, I don’t think you make depression itself funny—you make the world around it funny. You zoom in on the absurdity of everything that comes with it: therapy sessions, coping mechanisms, awkward silences when you’re honest about how you’re feeling. And most of all, the way people react to it.
10. Any topics off-limits? That’s not really for me to decide—that’s down to the audience. Society’s comfort levels shift over time, and it’s my job to spot that, work with it, and play around it. That said, I do self-censor to a degree—but it’s purely a gut reaction. And luckily, I’ve got a lot of gut to react with.
11. Most memorable audience reaction to Bad Fatty? The reactions that always hit hardest for me are from other fat people. I want the show to feel like a kind of fool’s guide to fat acceptance, so when someone leaves saying they feel better about themselves—even after all the daft jokes—that’s incredibly rewarding.
12. Have people reached out to say Bad Fatty helped them? One aspect that still surprises me is when non-fat people leave the show and say it gave them a new perspective—that they hadn’t realised what fat people go through. See? Educational and knob gags. What’s not to love? Haha.
13. Have you encountered tough crowds or backlash for the show’s themes? Honestly, I’ve been lucky. With a title like Bad Fatty, the audience tends to self-select. That said, I did have one moment—in Brighton, of all places—when a guy in the front row shouted, “Yeah mate, just go to the gym, innit.” Now, I’m not the kind of comic who immediately attacks hecklers. I try to keep it light until I’ve got a reason not to. So I looked at him and said, “Yes… or you could love your body.” Cue applause. I know that sounds a bit “Mr Big Head,” but that’s genuinely how it went. And moments like that remind me that the audience isn’t just laughing at the jokes—they’re backing the message behind them. And that’s just lovely.
14. Do you view your comedy as activism or storytelling? Why not both? I’m not here to lecture—it’s a comedy show, after all—but I am here to expose the absurdity of systems that treat fatness like a crime and queerness like a phase. If they leave googling “Is BMI nonsense?”—bonus.
15. Which performers inspire your approach to comedy? So many! As I mentioned earlier, Sofie Hagen has been a massive influence. Also: Hannah Gadsby, Richard Pryor, Jo Brand, Rhod Gilbert, Bill Hicks (we all deserve a Bill Hicks phase). And outside of comedy, gritty storytelling musicians like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and The Dubliners. But honestly? It’s the everyday people—the friends, family, and strangers who get through life by laughing.
16. What’s your process for writing a show like Bad Fatty? It started out as a kind of “greatest hits” of my club material—bits that had worked well, loosely tied together. But once I started writing toward a clear theme—fatness, shame, survival—it actually got easier. When you’ve got the whole world to write about, it’s overwhelming. But having a subject gives you structure, focus, and something to push against. That’s where the good stuff lives.
17. How has the show evolved since the beginning? In early work-in-progress versions, I realised some sections leaned too heavily into self-deprecation. It was veering toward “I’m fat and here’s an hour of me being mean to myself.” Now, the tone is more “Fat person kicks ass and takes names.” There’s still self-awareness, but it comes from strength, not apology. And that shift has changed the whole feel of the show—for me and for the audience.
18. What does it mean to perform this show at Fringe? Fringe can be amazing, beautiful, thrilling, and wild—but it can also be terrible, expensive, and exhausting. I look forward to it every year, and in some ways, I dread it. It’s like riding a horse: go slow, be steady, and maybe practise a bit first. This year, I’m doing a 45-minute show instead of the usual hour, and just a one-week run instead of a full month. So really, I’m probably riding a Shetland pony. But I can’t wait—not just to perform Bad Fatty, or host my fat comedy showcase Chonk, but to see other shows, reconnect with friends, and hopefully come away from it all a better comedian.
19. For someone who’s never seen your comedy, how would you describe Bad Fatty? A fat, queer, Welsh tour-de-force of a show that smashes diet culture, sexuality, and shame—all with sharp jokes and pure daftness.
20. The Takeaway? To not only be a Bad Fatty—but to use being fat as an advantage. The world is awful sometimes. And if you can’t change it, you might as well laugh and make the most of it.
