Posts Tagged immersive theatre

PUTTANA – Q&A with Mirko Corradini

September 19, 2026 at 5:14 pm · Filed under Interviews, Theatre ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PUTTANA was one of the most talked‑about international productions at this year’s Fringe: intimate, unsettling, and formally daring. It confronts prejudice, judgement, sex work, and the quiet violence of how society enters other people’s lives. Ahead of its wider international run, Counter Culture presents this in‑depth conversation with director Mirko Corradini, exploring the dramaturgy, ethics, sound design and collaborative process behind the production.

What first compelled you to create PUTTANA, a piece that confronts sex work, judgement, violence, and shared responsibility?

“PUTTANA began above all with a question about prejudice.”

He describes reading an article about a porn performer refused housing because of her job, and the question that stayed with him: why do we feel entitled to judge someone whose choices do not harm us? “I was not interested in saying that prostitution is right or wrong. I wanted to stop one step earlier.”

The show uses fragmentation rather than linear storytelling. What dramaturgical purpose does that structure serve?

“Our thoughts are never completely linear… In PUTTANA, different people speak… sometimes they seem to be in dialogue but are not really listening.”

Corradini explains that the structure mirrors the spectator’s slowly forming judgement rather than a traditional plot.

How did you approach directing a one‑woman performance that requires the actor to embody multiple characters around Laura?

“The main rule was to create together.” He recounts a rehearsal mistake that became a breakthrough, revealing how characters emerged collaboratively through experimentation

Why binaural audio and headphones?

“I realised that the real strength of the piece was that proximity… The headphones were the answer.”

The immersive sound design recreates intimacy even in larger spaces.

How do sound, proximity and moral tension interact?

“Sound does not accompany the performance. It is part of the direction.” Much of the audio is “dirty, unsettling sound” that becomes music.

Why was Beatrice Elena Festi chosen as your collaborator?

“I felt an artistic connection… elegance and precision in the transitions.”

Her subtle physical shifts made her ideal for a piece where technology completes the transformation.

How much emerged from her interpretation?

“A generous actor can create a new possibility simply through a mistake, a breath, a posture.”

How can theatre explore judgement and violence ethically?

“I can bring someone into a very intense situation as long as I continue to respect them.” He avoids literal nudity or violence to keep focus on meaning, not shock.

How did you see your responsibilities when dealing with emotional risk?

“Artistic availability must never become coercion.”

What did you hope Fringe audiences would confront?

“I wanted the spectator to ask themselves: Do I judge? Do I have prejudices?”

What surprised you in Edinburgh?

“Can this show speak to… someone from a culture completely different from ours? Edinburgh gave me an answer. Yes.”

What was the impact of the SoHo Playhouse Encore Series selection

“The New York selection gave me the confidence that PUTTANA could find an international audience precisely without giving up its willingness to take risks.”

How does PUTTANA relate to your wider work?

“I am interested in investigating what we do not say… the shadows we carry inside ourselves.”

What did this production teach you?

“That I enjoy myself more when I experiment.”

Where next?

“I can fall in love with a piece for a single actress… but also with a much larger project.”

What should spectators carry with them?

“Do I judge? Do I have prejudices? Will I look at someone differently tomorrow?”

Read our review of Puttana here
Read our interview with Beatrice Elena Festi here

 

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Puttana at Summerhall: Beatrice Elena Festi’s Raw, Immersive One‑Woman Reckoning

August 12, 2026 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Drama, Edinburgh Fringe 2026, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026, Theatre ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

★★★★★ Puttana is an intimate, one‑woman interrogation of a life lived at the intersection of desire, commerce and shame. The performance follows a single protagonist — a woman whose public persona and private interiority are braided together — as she moves through a series of encounters, memories and imagined conversattions. The show is structured as a sequence of short, sharp scenes and interior monologues rather than a conventional linear narrative: one moment you’re with her in a room negotiating a transaction, the next you’re inside her head as competing voices argue about agency, guilt and survival.

Technically the piece is built around an immersive headphone score that fractures the action into overlapping layers: external interlocutors, inner voices, and a kind of running commentary that sometimes addresses the audience directly. Beatrice Elena Festi slips between roles — client, confidante, accuser, child of memory — so the plot feels less like a story being told and more like a life being unpeeled. Key beats include confrontations about power and money, flashbacks that reveal how the protagonist learned to commodify herself, and moments of stark vulnerability where nudity and silence are used as ethical provocation rather than spectacle.

Puttana, as performed by Beatrice Elena Festi, doesn’t just ask you to watch — it asks you to account for yourself. The headphones and layered soundscape collapse the distance between performer and spectator, turning what might have been a passive evening into an interrogation of attention: whose voice are you listening to, whose body are you complicit in consuming, and where does empathy end and spectacle begin. Psychologically, that collapse is brilliant; it forces a kind of cognitive dissonance where your instinct to look away meets the theatrical demand to stay present, and that tension is where the piece does its work.

Philosophically, the show stages a conversation about agency and commodification. By foregrounding nudity and explicit power dynamics, Festi reframes vulnerability as a site of political argument rather than mere exposure. The nudity is not gratuitous — it’s a deliberate ethical provocation that asks the audience to examine the systems that turn bodies into transactions, and to recognise how easily spectatorship can become endorsement. In that sense the piece is less about shocking for shock’s sake and more about making visible the moral choices we perform in the dark.

On a human level, the experience is intimate and uncomfortable in equal measure, and that’s the point. You leave slightly unsettled because the show has done what good art should: it has altered the angle from which you see yourself and others. It doesn’t hand you answers; it hands you a mirror, a set of headphones, and the responsibility to decide what to do with the reflection.

Reviewed by Pat Harrington

Read our interview with Beatrice Elena Festi here

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Summerhall Sauna Theatre: Turning Up the Heat on Fringe Performance

August 5, 2026 at 6:20 am · Filed under Drama, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026 ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Edinburgh Fringe has always thrived on experimentation, but every so often something arrives that genuinely shifts the boundaries of what performance can be. This year, that distinction belongs to the Summerhall Sauna Theatre: a fully functioning, 82 person sauna transformed into an intimate performance venue. It’s an idea that sounds eccentric until you step inside and open your mind.
When I took the press tour the structures around the sauna were still being polished around the edges. Finishing touches were underway on the lockers and rest area, but the core is already fully operational: a sound booth with a window overlooking the sauna, cold showers for cooling down, two plunge pools capable of holding ice, and both unisex and individual changing rooms. Audiences are asked to wear swimsuits, and you’ll need two towels—one for sitting in the sauna, one for drying off afterwards. If you don’t have any you can hire and swimming suits are also available for sale. Water stations sit just outside the entrance, a reminder that this is theatre with a physiological dimension.

Aufguss: The Ancient Ritual at the Heart of It

Central to the experience is Aufguss, a practice with roots stretching back roughly two thousand years across Eastern and Northern Europe. Historically, saunas were communal and spiritual spaces—used for births, healing rituals, and preparing the dead. Over time, Aufguss evolved from a practical method of circulating heat into a stylised ritual led by a Saunameister. Today, it’s a choreographed art form: towels snapping and sweeping through the air, aromatic steam rising in waves, music underscoring the movement.
It’s part wellness, part ceremony, part performance. And in the Summerhall sauna, it becomes something else again—an expressive tool for storytelling.
During the press tour, performers demonstrated the technique with a kind of dance that sits somewhere between gesture and ritual. Towels became extensions of the body, which will be used to waft scent and heat around the room. It’s hypnotic to watch, and will be even more striking when you’re inside the sauna feeling the temperature shift with each movement.

A Taste of What’s On

One of the highlights of the preview was a performance by Nick Cassenbaum, known for Bubble Schmeises. His work—funny, sharp, rooted in Jewish identity—landed beautifully in the sauna’s intimate atmosphere. Accompanied by musicians, he delivered a story alongside a  wonderfully off‑beat rendition of Consider Yourself, reimagined with a jazzy, klezmer‑inflected twist. It was warm, witty, and perfectly suited to the space.
But the programme goes further than comedy.

Aufguss x the Waves

Among the flagship productions is Aufguss x The Waves, a bewitching reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Woolf’s novel is already fluid and sensory, and here it’s refracted through dance, heat, scent, sound, and light. The result is an immersive experience that feels less like watching a performance and more like being gently folded into one.
The sauna becomes a kind of emotional chamber. Heat rises and falls with the performers’ movements; scents drift in at key moments; light shifts in soft pulses. The effect is tender, atmospheric, and unexpectedly romantic—like falling in love on a summer afternoon, except you’re sitting in a sauna with strangers, wrapped in steam.

A Theatre That Travels

Perhaps one of the most exciting aspect is that the entire structure is mobile. Once the Fringe ends, the sauna theatre can be taken apart and transported to communities that may never have encountered anything like this. It’s an inclusive idea: performance that doesn’t wait for audiences to come to it, but instead goes to them.
It may take time for people to adjust to the idea of theatre in a sauna. But once they do, it’s easy to imagine this becoming a new kind of cultural space—one where storytelling is felt as much as seen. I love it!
Find out more and buy tickets here
Report from Pat Harrington

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00:45:00 – Five Walk In. One Walk Out. The Audience Decides.

July 30, 2026 at 9:25 am · Filed under Drama, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026, Interviews, Theatre ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Five people walk into a room, and only one will make it out alive. The clock is running, the rules are brutal, and the audience isn’t allowed to sit comfortably in the dark.

This is a real‑time experiment led by a scientist who wants to know whether one person’s life can ever be worth more than another’s — and what happens when ordinary people are pushed to make that decision. It’s a story about spectators who discover they’re participants, about the moment when watching becomes acting, and about the uncomfortable truth that complicity is rarely abstract.

The playwright behind 00:45:00, Katie Gaven, understands that moral pressure isn’t a gimmick — it’s a provocation. Here, she talks about how the idea formed, why she wants audiences to feel implicated, and how the show has transformed on its journey to the Edinburgh Fringe.

When did the premise of five people entering a room and only one leaving stop being a dramatic device and start becoming a moral experiment you wanted to run on an audience?

The dramatic premise came to me pretty quickly once I knew I wanted to write a psychological thriller, and the decision to turn it into a social or moral experiment developed hand in hand with that. I’ve always loved the horror genre, especially psychological horror, and a lot of the material that inspired me was told through digital mediums — Alice in Borderland, Black Mirror, Squid Game.

That made me ask myself: if I’m going to work in this genre, why tell it through live theatre? The thing I love most about theatre is the way it connects people. So it made sense that the experiment should involve the audience directly.

The show asks whether one life can ever be “worth more” than another. Do you see that as a provocation, or as a question we all quietly answer every day without admitting it.

Honestly, I think it can be both. Weighing one life against another is not something we like to think about day to day. Putting people in that spot is tricky — you can lose the trust of an audience if you mishandle it.

But I also believe one of our best human qualities is empathy, the kind that ignites us to fight and advocate for others. That’s what I wanted to experiment with. It’s a question I’ve asked our audiences to think about, and I hope we can all try to make sense of it together.

Immersive theatre often lets audiences hide behind the novelty of participation. You seem to be doing the opposite — forcing them to confront complicity. What made you want to push them into that uncomfortable territory.

It’s a hard balance, and I’m still figuring it out. One of the main things I’m discovering through new drafts and conversations is that there’s actually positivity in acknowledging complicity. When we treat that acknowledgment as a victory — a step in the right direction — it becomes easier to inspire ourselves and others to do more.

Complicity is difficult to reckon with in everyday life. I think it’s good to be reminded of it, prodded to engage with it. It’s something I’m still unpacking within myself.

 

You explore corruption of power and the temptation to look away from injustice. Were there particular moments — political, personal, global — that made you realise this was the story you needed to tell now.

There are so many things that factored into it. The world feels full of terrifying injustices, and while media can be a tool, it can also be desensitizing. We see horrible acts of violence and political injustice every day, and I often feel horrible but also powerless — unsure how I can personally make a difference.

I consider myself privileged, and I never want that to become an excuse to disengage. I feel desperate to actively engage in these conversations and hold myself accountable. This play is an attempt at searching for that action.

The piece was first produced at UNCSA and is now leaping to the Fringe. How has the show changed as it moved from a university environment to an international stage.

OMG it has changed so. freaking. much. We did our first production at my university in a very controlled environment, got incredibly helpful feedback, and were insanely fortunate to be supported by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and fiscally sponsored by Producer Hub.

The play has gone through new drafts, more audience feedback, and a total transformation thanks to the financial support that allowed us to collaborate with amazing artists — our publicist Rosaline Hodgetts, lighting designer Miles Goldsmith, and many more. I can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on.

You’re a six‑time published playwright with recognition from Scholastics, The Blank Theatre, and California Young Playwrights. Does 00:45:00 feel like a continuation of your earlier work, or a rupture — a new artistic chapter.

This is definitely a new artistic chapter. Believe it or not, I’m mostly known as a comedic writer, so working on this play has been a new and vulnerable experience. I’ve never been so scared or excited for a play before. Experimenting with this genre has taught me so much, and I’m excited to see how it influences me as an actor, writer, and director.

Audience participation can be gimmicky if mishandled. How do you ensure the involvement here isn’t a trick, but a genuine ethical pressure point.

For us, it’s important to keep our end goal in mind. If we believe the audience participation is important and impactful, the audience will believe that too.

We’re specific about what success looks like for each character so we understand how participation affects their journey. Most interaction is between the audience and Dr. Wilison, so establishing her objective from the moment she welcomes the audience is crucial. Every bit of participation gets her closer to her goal, and treating those interactions as integral makes them feel genuine.

The show is supported by the Kenan Institute and fiscally sponsored by Producer Hub. Did that backing give you freedom, or sharpen your sense of responsibility.

It definitely sharpened our sense of responsibility. This has been a huge learning experience in balancing collaboration, and I’m beyond grateful for the opportunity.

There’s no way we could’ve done this without the financial support and collaboration from the Kenan Institute and Producer Hub. Getting new work onto the stage is a huge challenge, and for most young playwrights it would be impossible without this kind of help. We feel unbelievably lucky and are doing everything we can to make them proud.

Your cast comes from varied backgrounds — film, theatre, dance, visual art. How did those different artistic languages shape the tension inside the room.

It helps that we all come from the same training program, so we share the same acting vocabulary. I’m an actress first and then a writer, so connecting with the cast as a director through familiar techniques has been great.

At the same time, being multifaceted artists helps us collaborate. Each person brings unique skills. Our best days are when we embrace our different approaches and use them intentionally to build a cohesive world.

Fringe audiences are famously game for risk, but they’re also saturated with choice. What do you hope they walk out carrying — adrenaline, discomfort, clarity, or simply a question they can’t un‑ask.

Absolutely a question they can’t un‑ask. I want this to spark conversation. I don’t know the answers to the questions I’m asking — I want to learn through others.

I also hope to inspire actionable activism instead of passivity. I wrote this play because I’m still unsure how to create change, but I believe the first step is recognizing you want to get involved and engaging in conversations to figure out how.

We hope people interested in those discussions will come see us at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival — August 17–22 at thespaceUK @ Surgeon’s Hall (Stephenson Theatre) and August 24–28 at thespaceUK @ Venue 45. Join us for an experiment you won’t forget.

Buy tickets here

 

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