Dorothy Max Prior sees an interesting batch of solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024. Although some turn out to be other than what they first seem to be…

As ever, there were very many solo shows on offer at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Sit in Pleasance Courtyard for 5 minutes, or stroll along the Royal Mile (if you can bear it) and you will be regaled by performers selling you their one-person shows. Many are autobiographical, or comic, or both. There’s more than a fair few focused on personal identity, overcoming adversity, or surviving trauma. Others involve the taking on of a character, or multiple characters, in a storyteller role.

Of course, this being Total Theatre, I’m keen to seek out the work that best fits our remit. We are not strictly promoting ‘physical and visual’ work alone these days, but I’m still drawn strongly to work that has its roots in physical and devised theatre training, for example, coming from the Lecoq tradition or from the circus or clown world.

On the first day of the Fringe, I start in at Summerhall with a very lovely show called Julieta, by Mexican clown Gabriela Muñoz, who was previously seen at the London International Mime Festival with Perhaps Perhaps Quizas. Gabriela goes out as Chula the Clown, who in this case is playing the eponymous Julieta – a lady of a certain age who marks her days alone in her home with a succession of small rituals. It is beautiful clowning. Gaby Muñoz has a fantastic presence as a performer, and really understands the performer/audience relationship – be it the small glances and shrugs or the bigger gestures and interactions (a game of noughts and crosses; a silent invitation to help her with her lipstick or nail varnish). It is also a beautifully designed piece – the set and costume and sound design in her work are never tagged-on extras, but intrinsic elements, providing visual and aural storytelling that work alongside the word-free physical performance of our clown. 

We first meet Julieta at the start of the day – as the cock crows we could say. She arrives into her chintzy sage-green and cream sitting-room carrying her pet chicken, which she places carefully on the floor, and feeds. Although the chicken (a stuffed toy that of course can’t move) doesn’t eat, so after a while, with a sheepish look to the audience, Julieta helps herself to the little corn pellets. We see Julieta breakfasting on water and pills dumped down onto her gilt hostess trolley; Julieta resplendent in her neon orange leotard exercising on her vibrating exercise board (a particularly ludicrous and hilarious scene); Julieta making calls on her rotary-dial telephone; and Julieta listening to old Mexican favourites like ‘La Llorona’ on her transistor radio, or watching TV on her ancient set. And so the day passes to night, and another day dawns. At first, we are in Waiting for Godot territory – witnessing a play in which nothing happens twice. The day progresses much the same as the last (and many more before it, we guess). But then comes the shift. The TV breaks. A repair man is needed. Cue audience interaction. As with previous show Perhaps… (in which our clown heroine procures a bridegroom from the audience) there are no half-measures here. A man is chosen from the audience, and once he’s drawn into the action, he becomes an intrinsic part of the play. There are many marvellous moments with her new co-star, but I’ll flag up just one gem – a magnificent bolero dance, with Julieta in a tangerine organza frock and extraordinarily silly blue rubber-tube arms/rubber-glove hands entwining her new-found lover in an embrace, much to his startled surprise. These gloves, and other objects that play a crucial role in the dramaturgy of the piece, arrive on stage via an invisible second performer-cum-stagehand. Which reminds us that solo performers are very often not alone on stage!

Another, very different, solo show by a female clown is Look After Your Knees by Funny Women finalist Natalie Bellingham, seen at Pleasance Courtyard, which delves ‘into the space inside us left behind by time’, exploring ‘the pain and beauty of growing older’. As we arrive in the space, we see a performance area set with a circular rug, a chair, a standard lamp, a coffee table sporting a small fan, and a number of cardboard boxes, which will give up their contents over the coming hour. Nat enters and her lovely performance energy immediately imbues the room. There’s no fourth wall: she acknowledges people in the audience she knows with a nod and a wink and offers friendly (word-free) appreciation of people she doesn’t – for example, she admires the white marabou stole of the woman sitting next to me with a mimed ‘wow!’. And now she speaks: Isn’t this nice! Being here – all together. A joy. 

The next hour is indeed a joy – a delightful mélange of verbal storytelling, carefully enacted movement motifs, object theatre, and gentle clowning. It’s a show about growing up. About being old enough to know what you want (some of the time, anyway). About surviving bereavement. About re-evaluating the distresses of childhood. About the joys and the pains of adulthood. The sea is a central motif – we return to it in numerous ways over the hour. The child Nat wondering how the tide goes in and out, learning about the cycles of the moon. An older self walking off her grief barefoot on the rocky shoreline. A fantastical story of an encounter with a stranded whale, which acts as a metaphor for the need to accept that sometimes you just can’t make things better, all you can do is to be there. At the end, the marabou lady sitting next to me turns to her friend and says, ‘Well, it wasn’t really about dodgy knees or old age, was it? But I did enjoy it!’ The show is co-created and directed by eminent clown/physical theatre performer Jamie Wood, and this supports the notion that although we might be seeing just one person on stage, they are not standing alone.

Over at Zoo Playground, Duncan Hodgkinson invites us ‘To Dream the Impossible Dream’, in his first solo show Dante and the Robot – which is also directed by Jamie Wood. Here, the fourth wall is firmly in place, which is perhaps a dramaturgical decision intended to flag up our hero Dante’s extreme isolation. The year is 2087, and Dante lives alone in his bedsit with only his house robot – called She-bot, an amusingly lo-tech talking bucket – for company. He’s almost 25, and about to receive his first ‘upgrade’. We find out more about these upgrades as the show progresses – turns out that he and the bot will become symbiotic, so he’ll never again have any privacy, not even a private thought. His life is bleak: he hates his job, and his girlfriend has headed off to Japan, rejecting contemporary urban life in favour of walking up a mountain barefoot and living off foraged herbs and mushrooms. Dante finds mental escape from the distresses of his life through the writing of a screenplay about a Spanish knight who is not named, but bears a close resemblance to a certain battler of windmills! 

Like many sci-fi tales, Dante and the Robot is far more about our current culture and concerns than it is about the future. It references our relationship to AI, the climate crisis, the obsession with youthfulness, and the appeal of dropping out from the urban rat-race. Apart from the upfront reference to Don Quixote, we also note allusions to Brave New World, with the errant Japanese girlfriend taking on the role of the (Rousseau inspired) Noble Savage. The piece has a very minimal set and staging: white tape on the floor marks out the living area; with nothing but a thin mattress, an empty frame on the wall, and the She-bot in the space. So with very little visual stimulation, it all comes down to the actor’s skills – and luckily Duncan Hodgkinson is an able performer, who manages to juggle the very many strands of the story (and it is a pretty dense text) with a confident delivery, and a strong physicality. 

Over at Assembly Checkpoint, solo performer Sasha Krohn presents The Weight of Shadow, in collaboration with theatre company Flabbergast – an intensely physical, nay visceral, depiction of distress. The stage, set with a single bed, is drenched with intense green and blue lighting, and a thrumming drone fills the space. A foot, a leg, then a whole body emerges from the bed. Shaven-skulled, bare-chested, jerking and twitching to an intense electronic soundtrack – we are reminded of legendary physical performances by the likes of Derevo and Al Seed. The disturbed and disturbing figure moves from bed to floor to chair, a painful journey. A wrenching joust with a hoodie and again with a coat. An encounter with a mirror. Everything is jagged, on edge. Back to bed, and a dramatic switch to red lighting for a straps routine embodying a recurring nightmare, the twisting figure ultimately hanging upside down – a strong image. A slightly clunky transition back into the bed, and once again the sleeping figure wakes, and it all begins again. There’s no let up. It’s a physical tour-de-force by a very talented performer – a disturbing picture of mental illness, enacted with precision.

Back to Summerhall for Cosmos, a really unusual solo show – although like many of the shows discussed here, one created by more than one person. In this case, the team is aerialist and actor Ashtar Mullem (previously seen in the Total Theatre Award winning Palestinian Circus show B-orders) and co-creator and director, Clement Dazin. 

We enter the space to see Ashtar sitting calmly at the foot of the cream silks that are hanging down centrestage. The theatrical conceit is that we are joining her in a yoga and meditation class. She welcomes us, invites us to breathe with her, before sounding her Tibetan bowl, and getting out her stretch band. There follows a long autobiographical monologue, delivered while she bends and contorts herself into all sorts of extraordinary shapes. ‘Where is home?’ she asks. ‘My body was my first home,’ she continues. She tells us about her home, the holy city of Jerusalem, and its three religions – Jewish, Muslim and Christian – who all lay claim to it as central to their faith. She talks of her relationship to her grandmother, and the deals she struck, agreeing to go to worship if she got a trip to the market afterwards… She never names her grandmother’s religion, and makes it clear that she is mighty tired of the conflicts around faith in her country, Palestine. She is critical of the 1948 international agreements and subsequent events that have seen her country chopped up and shrunk, but although she is clear-cut in her beliefs, and expresses them in a forthright way, there is always levity and a wry humour in her delivery. Not least because the words come from an upside-down face poking through her legs, or from a body back-bended into a bridge position. When she turns the right way up momentarily, her face looks all wrong! Perception and point-of-view is everything… 

The show also includes two beautiful silks routines, one emerging from a scene in which a man in the audience is brought on stage to chop onions whilst she dances for him. (A man wearing a French beret, so for a moment I suspect he’s a plant, but I think it’s just coincidence!) Not quite Salome style, but she uses the silks to drape and veil her body, as she moves sinuously on the ground and in the air. The riffing on masculinity and men needing to cry (hence the onions!) doesn’t quite come off with conviction, and the ending of the piece feels a little odd, as she moves back into yoga teacher mode – but overall, it’s a beautiful piece of work. Great to see circus skills used so inventively. 

A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here describes itself as ‘a solo show in celebration of togetherness’. Josie Dale-Jones sits alone on stage behind a desk. She has had a difficult few years. She created a show called The Family Sex Show which aimed to explore issues around sexuality and gender with children, in a loving and caring way, but her intentions were misunderstood, and she found herself at the heart of an enormous storm: receiving threatening letters and emails accusing her of being a paedophile and suggesting she kill herself; becoming the subject of derogatory podcasts tarring her as a pervert; and having the show cancelled and her Arts Council funding withdrawn. All this information is presented in a series of monologues and litanies; delivered with clarity and conviction. She plays a section of the obnoxious podcast and sits stony faced as the swearing and insults pour forth. Ultimately, this is a story about survival. She calls out those who have done her harm (including Arts Council England) with courage and determination.

But although she sits alone, she’s not alone. She has her family (her parents are renowned theatre makers, co-founders of Hoipolloi), her company comrades (she is director of theatre company ThisEgg, creators of the brilliant dressed), and dear supportive friends. This show is a collaborative creation, with the team including ThisEgg co-creator Laurence Cook, and director Rachel Lemon. It is beautifully staged, with an excellent lighting design (being ‘in the spotlight’ an ongoing metaphor). There is a lovely shift in energy as Josie exits and re-enters in a gold lamé suit, giving us a fabulous tap dance routine to ‘That’s Entertainment’, replete with wings and crab-rolls – this girl can dance! We see in this routine a young, eager stage-school pupil looking forward to her career in the biz, unaware of the set-backs to come. Or we see an older and wiser artist, able to smile and shine beyond the hazards, and dance herself dizzy with joy. There’s another theatrical twist towards the end of the show – a Deus Ex Machina moment involving another person that I won’t spoil!

So really and truly, she is not alone. Had I known the subject of the piece, I might not have gone along to see it – I have a resistance to theatre shows about theatre. But this is something far more than that, a truly uplifting piece about resistance, survival and community.  

Theatre is by nature a collaborative artform, and the lesson from all of the shows seen here is that even if it’s a solo show, it is more often than not a team effort.

Featured image (top): Ashtar Mullem / Clement Dazin: Cosmos

The Edinburgh Fringe 2024 runs 2 August till 25 August, various venues. For further information on all Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows, see www.edfringe.com

Gaby Muñoz: Julieta, Summerhall, 1-11 August 2024 

Natalie Bellingham: Look After Your Knees, Pleasance Courtyard, 1-25 August 2024

Duncan Hodgkinson: Dante and the Robot, Zoo Playground, 1-25 August 2024

 Sasha Krohn and Flabbergast Theatre: The Weight of Shadow, Assembly Checkpoint, 1-25 August 2024

Ashtar Muallem / Clement Dazin: Cosmos, Summerhall, 1-11 August 2024

ThisEgg: A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here, 1-14 August 2024 

Food glorious food – here’s Dorothy Max Prior with an Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 taster menu, featuring Sean Wai Keung with A History of Fortune Cookies, Traverse/Soho Theatre production My English Persian Kitchen, and Ugly Bucket’s Stuffed

Food and theatre have a lot in common, am I right? Both are about sharing – community through communion.

I’ve always been a sucker for shows that involve real-time cooking and eating. And there have been a fair few ’foodie’ shows seen over the years in Edinburgh, during the festival month of August. Off the top of my head, there was Geoff Sobelle’s Food a couple of years ago, which (in keeping with Sobelle’s anarchic clown persona) was a somewhat surreal banquet; and quite a few years earlier, Peta Lily directed Karola Gajda in My Polish Roots, in which a rather marvellous root-vegetable Borscht was made onstage whilst Karola’s Polish heritage was explored. Grid Iron gave us The Devil’s Larder, Curious were On the Scent, and Lemon Bucket Orkestra were Counting Sheep whilst inviting us to a wedding feast. Beyond Edinburgh, many and various artists and companies – from Kindle Theatre to Karavan Ensemble, Odin Teatr to Akhe, Leo Kay to Fevered Sleep – have invited us to feast our eyes and dine with them.

And now, in this 2024 festival season, here we are again. Come dine with me, say the theatre-makers!

For starters, here’s Sean Wai Keung with A History of Fortune Cookies. As we enter a small and somewhat scruffy basement room at Summerhall, we see a table with nine or ten chairs around three sides. On the other side, a young man stands stirring a batter mix. This is Sean, and he tells us that he is making fortune cookies, using the traditional recipe of flour, water, egg, a pinch of salt, and a dash of sugar. He has substituted regular egg for a vegan egg mix, for the sake of inclusivity – which is what sharing food is all about. And no need for fancy additions like vanilla, he says. Simple is better. ‘I’m like a fortune cookie,’ he goes on to say – by which he means that he is neither Eastern nor Western, but a hybrid. Fortune cookies, we learn, had their origins in Japan, but their current form was invented in the USA, and initially marketed as Japanese cookies – until Pearl Harbour, which meant all things Japanese were to be avoided; so they were re-branded as a Chinese treat. 

When Sean’s maternal grandparents came to Scotland from Hong Kong, they (almost inevitably, as it is what immigrants so often do) opened a restaurant. Well, a Chinese take-away, anyway. Sean remembers a childhood spent perched on the counter, putting the fortune cookies in to the customers’ carry-out bags. They were in a big box, up high, and he never questioned where they came from, they were just always there, a mountain of little gold-foil-wrapped treasures. In fact, most of the world’s fortune cookies come via Wonton Food Inc in Brooklyn, who make millions daily. He also muses on his childhood memories of the differences between the food cooked in the take-away (chow mein and sweet-and-sour chicken balls) and the food they ate at home (steamed sea bass and congee rice porridge). 

Sean shares some of his interview research on fortune cookies. Apparently, some people don’t eat them, just pull them apart to get the fortune. In fact, some people don’t even realise you can eat them! This food wastage would have horrified Sean’s grandparents, who grew up during World War Two, when Japan occupied Hong Kong, and food was scarce…

Once the batter is mixed, it is poured into little cookie cases and cooked – not too much, as it needs to be pliable. In the meantime, we are invited to write our own fortune cookie messages, for ourselves or for others. Sean passes on his grandfather’s comment that the fortunes shouldn’t just be bland pleasantries, but have a bit of bite to them. Mine says ‘Whatever is happening, it will pass’. We are each given a metal cookie case with its little oval of lightly cooked dough, and we try to follow Sean’s example, enclosing the folded slip of paper into a kind of heart-shaped chamber. Et voila, fortune cookies.

Thirty minutes has gone by in a flash, and it is only as we leave that I realise how much has been shared and reflected on: What it is to be neither one thing nor another, always the outsider, your heritage often not seen or understood; how language can unite or divide, and how being bilingual often means being not quite there with either language; how hard immigrants work to establish themselves within a community, using food as a bridge to acceptance. At the start, Sean is a little actorly in his delivery, but as the show progresses, he relaxes into his role as storyteller and cook, watched over by a photo of his dearly departed Chinese grandparents. A History of Fortune Cookies is a tasty little treat – a poignant reflection on the human desire to fit in, to belong.

Exploring much of the same territory – migration, the need to belong, using food to provide comfort in hard times and to bridge the gap between people – comes our main course: My English Persian Kitchen, seen at The Traverse. The play, written by Hannah Khalil and directed by Chris White, is based on the true-life story of best-selling cookery book author Atoosa Sepehr.

Once again, as we enter the space, food is being prepared. Performer Isabella Nefar is set up behind a pretty swanky food station, chopping a mix of herbs: mint, spinach, chives, parsley and dill. Meanwhile, onions are frying in oil. The lights dim, and she addresses us directly, breaking the fourth wall from the start: ‘Can you smell those onions? Good, yes?’ Onions make you cry; you can’t help but cry, she says, and there’s an ironic note in her voice… 

She is making Ash-E-Reshteh – Persian noodle soup. You get it everywhere in Iran, we learn, as our unnamed narrator tells us tales of her teenage years standing on street corners with friends, chatting over take-out bowls of soup. We also learn that women like our narrator – highly educated, modern Iranian girls – don’t learn to cook as they don’t want to be tied to the kitchen stove like their mothers. 85% of Iranian women are educated to university level: ‘Of course we don’t cook. We work. We are professionals. As successful as the men.’

Over the next hour we witness a masterclass in storytelling – a recipe that blends the verbal, the physical and the visual with the additional sensory delights of smell and taste. A potent mix, served up with aplomb. Cooking might require a linear trajectory, but stories don’t necessarily work that way – memories and associations freely jump around in this tale of oppression, escape, liberation, and forging a new identity through food-making. We move from present to distant past to recent past, and back to the present. The overhead lamp, the cooking knives, and the fridge at the back of the space are used brilliantly as props to the storytelling, as our narrator embodies the memories that are surfacing. At first there are small hints, then fuller details follow. As the hour progresses, disparate images and expressed thoughts link up. A childhood incident of falling in to a swimming pool as a toddler – ‘can’t breathe… going under’ – ties into an account of our heroine’s abusive husband strangling her; and then to the moment where, stepping up to show her passport before boarding the plane that will take her to freedom, she tightens her headscarf so as not to attract attention for immodest appearance. Once again her breathe is held for a horribly long time, the sensation of choking overwhelming. Once on the plane, the scarf is discarded, then deliberately left behind on her seat as she disembarks and jumps into a taxi speeding away to a new life. A life that is painfully lonely for a long time, but eventually it is food that forms the bridge to community. She may have eschewed cooking as a young women, but now she loves it, and loves sharing her Persian meals with her neighbours. 

The soup is smelling good, and she’s made the toppings, too –  kasbk and saffron water and mint oil and fried garlic. She cheats a bit on the kasbk, using alternative ingredients that she can get in the UK, but she feels that’s OK. Would we like a taste? Most definitely! We crowd around. ‘This is better than yesterday, where we had an English queue,’ says our narrator, or perhaps by now she has become herself, Isabella – and we laugh as she dishes out the bowls of Ash-E-Reshteh. Such a delightful show – so carefully constructed, so beautifully performed. A feast for the soul.

For afters we have Ugly Bucket’s Stuffed. Not a show about food, we are told – a show about food banks. A show about ‘the bad stuff’. It’s a take-no-prisoners show that uses rebel clowning to brilliant effect: political theatre of the best sort – loud, abrasive, feisty, funny. And hard-hitting – literally, as the five performers stomp and bang and shout and punch the air in synchronised bursts of frenzied deviant disco routines, with the electronic music-making and physical performance merging seamlessly. The set is made up of industrial shelving, tables, and food crates; with projections of key phrases onto a curtain dividing up the performance space, and screens above providing captioning. 

Verbatim interviews with food bank workers are delivered by performers combining lip-synching and BSL signing to the original audio recording, to hammer home the shocking tales of true deprivation. A situation that is no accident, we are told, but deliberately engineered to keep a shell-shocked underclass cowering, denied any agency in their own lives.

This is all played out in a number of darkly funny scenes inspired by the recorded interviews, including one in which complete envisceration is responded to with the arrival of a team of band-aid bearing officials; and another that transposes the line ‘fighting over crumbs’ into a fabulous battle between squawking and pecking human birds. 

A scene that really hits home starts with the words ‘Why don’t they make soup?’ projected on to the curtain, the related audio interview playing out the reasons why whilst the performers lie inert on the floor. I’ll confess to having thought this myself: there have been times when I’ve been low on cash, and soup is so cheap and easy to make, right? Well yes, it is if (like me) you were brought up in a home where cooking from scratch was the norm. Easy if you know how, have stock and herbs and spices to-hand, have use of a cooker, have electricity, are able-bodied and mentally fit, well enough to make it to the shops, don’t get stressed by the crying children at your feet… We take so much for granted.

After witnessing the two earlier shows celebrating the making and sharing of food, it is sobering to be reminded that this is not everyone’s life experience. But it should be, and if you want to help to make that happen, Ugly Bucket have those crates for food bank donations, and a leaflet they give out full of suggestions – with a couple of free tea bags thrown in. Make a cuppa for yourself and share one, they suggest. You can’t change the whole world, but start with yourself and the person in front of you, then the people two doors down. Little by little, we can change things. Yes, we can.

Featured image (top) Sean Wai Keung: A History of Fortune Cookies

Sean Wai Keung: A History of Fortune Cookies runs twice-daily 1-16 August 2024 at Summerhall, 12:15 and 12:50. See www.summerhall.co.uk  

Soho Theatre & Traverse Theatre: My English Persian Kitchen plays at Traverse Theatre, 1 Aug – 25 Aug 2024 (not 5,12,19) various times. See: https://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on/event/my-english-persian-kitchen-festival-24 

It will then transfer to Soho Theatre London, running 16 Sep-5 Oct 2024.

Ugly Bucket: Stuffed is at Pleasance Courtyard, 31 July to 26 August 2024, at 14:25.  See www.pleasance.co.uk 

Bloodthirsty buffoons, a giant snail, a pit of fire-breathing snakes, an invisible orchestra, and a troupe of death-defying showwomen: Out There International Festival of Outdoor Arts and Circus 2024 had something for everyone, as Dorothy Max Prior discovered. Additional reporting by James Foz Foster

It’s the first night of Out There Festival 2024, and although this is predominantly an outdoor arts festival, we are indoors, in the Hippodrome, Great Yarmouth’s legendary purpose-built circus venue. It’s a beautiful space – even the toilets are beautiful, with their red-painted doors plastered with old circus posters in glorious technicolour. It’s ten minutes before the first show of the Festival, and there’s a buzzy crowd taking their places in the rows of red velvet seats rising up in steep tiers from the ringside.

So yes, we are here for a circus show, of sorts. But it’s not a run-of-the-mill one – there’s more here than mere tricks and turns (although there are plenty of those too). The show – merging theatre, circus, and performance art – asks: What happens to the showgirl when she grows up?

The answer, ring-mistress Marisa Carnesky tells us, is that she becomes a showwoman – with two ‘w’s, one for the ‘show’ and one for the ‘woman’. A showwoman, we learn, is ‘showing herself because she wants to’. And, vitally, ‘she never misses a show’. 

 Showwomen has been researched and directed by Marisa Carnesky – who was initially inspired by her trips to the National Circus and Fairground Archive in Sheffield – and created in collaboration with three others: performance poet and sword artist Livia Kojo Alour, ‘fire lady’ and suspension artist Lucifire, and Veronica Thompson, aka hair-hanger extraordinaire Fancy Chance. For the Out There Festival performances, Marisa, Livia and Lucifire are joined by aerialist and hair-hanger Jackie Le in place of Veronica Thompson, who has commitments elsewhere.

In the show, the contemporary performers explore their own showwomen circus and sideshow practices with reference to the legacy of forgotten and marginalised female British entertainers. Before we get going on the individual stories, there’s a nice little ensemble scene in which our showwomen act out a medley of telephone enquiries. They state the nature of their acts, their price, and their conditions of engagement. A repeated mantra emerges: ‘No, I don’t do that – but I know someone who does.’ 

The show weaves fabulous individual circus acts and death-defying stunts with autobiographical revelation, vintage film footage and stills, and musings on the historic showwomen that each have forged a connection to. There’s a gorgeous aerial hoop routine by Jackie Le, who is of Asian heritage, to the tune of Mae West singing, ’I’m an occidental woman in an oriental mood for love.’ All irony fully intended. The historic 1880s teeth-hanging aerialist superstar Miss La La is referenced in the show, although we get hair-hanging from Jackie rather than teeth-hanging, a truly treacherous practice! Marisa, replete in a pomposity of pom-poms, summons up the spirit of 1930s clown Lulu Adams. Livia – formerly a sword-swallower, but now confining herself to (merely) walking on blades and (gasp!) broken glass – channels the 1940s circus star and fakir Koringa, who may or may not have been Black – exploring the dubious heritage of the exoticised Black female body in circus and cabaret. Lucifire whip-cracks-away with breathtaking skill, repeatedly breaking the sound barrier in homage to 1950s Western skills performer Florence Shufflebottom, a sharpshooter and snake-charmer who started off in the family business as part of her father’s knife-throwing act, aged just 5 years old. 

And here’s a thing: in the audience tonight are members of the Shufflebottom family, including Florence’s son! The family’s contribution to the post-show discussion adds a wonderful poignancy to the evening. 

It’s a fabulous show, merging all of its various elements seamlessly to create something that is both an exposition of top-notch circus skills and a deconstruction of those skills; alongside an exploration of where the contemporary showwoman is placed in relation to the history of circus and sideshow. Why do women continue to put their bodies and themselves on the line in the name of entertainment? And are we still willing to break taboos? We return again and again to those two key maxims: She is showing herself because she wants to. And she never misses a show. The show must go on…

With the change of dates of Out There to the end of May, it is the Festival’s intention going forward that they have a show in the Hippodrome each year. And with a new circus and arts centre, the Ice House, opening at the 2025 festival, there will be an increase in indoor programming for the Festival from next year onwards. But for this year, the outdoor work remains at the heart of the festival, although there is also the usual programme of indoor shows and activities at the organisation’s headquarters, The Drill House. 

This year, Friday and Saturday were the key days for the outdoor programme, rather than the usual Saturday and Sunday of past years – with the Party in the Park nights kicking off on Thursday evening. As it was spring half-term holiday, Friday and Saturday saw the main sites for the shows – St George’s Park, Trafalgar Road and the Marina Centre Car Park – packed with family audiences out and about despite the squally weather. Thankfully, regardless of wind and occasional spots of rain, all shows went ahead, and a good time was had by all. Also, the move to late spring meant extended daylight hours – so shows continued well into each evening.

As always, the work presented was an eclectic mix of the traditional and the experimental – and much that, like Showwomen, merged the two. There was street theatre (some static and some promenade), circus of all sorts, dance, music, comedy, interactive game-playing – and some boundary crossing shows difficult to categorise!

Out There Festival has always been a strong supporter of street theatre of all sorts, from the traditional character-comedy shows that England always seems to have done well, to the more experimental imports (often from France).

In that first category came Festival favourites Cocoloco, who took to the streets with Mafia Wedding, a promenade show which tells the tale of a mafia boss with a pregnant daughter in urgent need of a groom (not to mention a bridesmaid or two, a priest, and a congregation) for a shotgun wedding. The show has been in the company’s repertoire for quite a long while as a two-hander, but here is given a makeover, with local community performers and students (many of whom took part in last year’s Cocoloco show, Shangri-la-la) returning to swell the ranks of the wedding party, resplendently dressed in pin-striped suits and furs, high-heels and hats. Cocoloco’s Trevor Stuart – whose longstanding and noble street theatre heritage includes many years with The Natural Theatre Company – was clearly born to play the mafioso father of the bride; and partner Helen Statman’s nine-months-pregnant Maria is a superbly pitched character. The shockingly hilarious ‘waters breaking’ scene in the middle of Yarmouth’s busy Trafalgar Road will stay with me a long time. And I did so enjoy dancing The Godfather waltz…

Also homegrown, and also a promenade piece: Jones and Barnard took us on their Golden Tour along the seafront drag, aided and abetted by another street theatre veteran, Paschale Straiton – who comes with excellent credentials, as her company Red Herring have created more than one fabulous performance-guide to a seaside town!  

We gather at the Marina, and are issued with colourful parasols, which we are instructed to wave in the air with gay abandon. The gaudy parasols are a nice touch, uniting us as a group, inviting amused glances from passers-by. Matt Barnard, dressed in a luscious violet velvet suit and a cheeky little hat, is our principal guide (or perhaps that should be mis-guide) – although he does pass the baton to the other two along the way. Gareth Jones and Paschale employ quick-change strategies to play a number of different characters, channelling Great Yarmouth’s history, real or imagined. Thus, Paschale morphs from Trixie Tarot the flouncy fortune-teller to a beard-stroking Charles Dickens who apparently lived locally for a while; whilst Gareth plays ‘Jerry’ – the whole of the Luftwaffe, no less – who bombed the local sea defences before being seen off by Dad’s Army, later becoming an amalgam of two famous local divers, our plucky performer taking an almost-naked dive into a bucket of cold water, assisted by a posse of strong men drawn from the audience. No mean feat in the low temperatures of the day, with the North Sea winds gusting! At one point on the journey, Matt disappears to re-emerge in wig and frock at the door of old music hall The Empire, having transformed himself into locally renowned opera singer ‘Lily’. We cross the road from The Empire to the seafront lawns, the other two joining ‘Lily’ in a fabulous rendition of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado hit ‘Three Little Girls From School Are We’. The trio then morph into rappers to big up the history of the Ice House and sing the praises of Yarmouth’s ice cream parlours (nice link there, lads and lassie). Jones and Barnard’s obvious parallel with Laurel and Hardy, in body size and master-and-servant clown roles, is honoured, as the two give us a Stan and Ollie song-and-dance number outside Britannia Pier.

It’s a show full of brilliant ideas, with very many great vignettes – although some scenes are stronger than others. The pace is a little wonky, and it needs a fair bit of ironing out, but it is important to acknowledge that it’s brand-new, and with this sort of work – promenade in public space with numerous interactions and costume changes – there is no real way to rehearse it other than to do it. It is site-specific to Great Yarmouth, so it’s not as if they could easily transpose it elsewhere and get the usual bedding-in that new street theatre shows receive in the summer season. But as it is full of potential and so clearly belongs here in Yarmouth, let’s hope Out There bring it back next year with more development time beforehand – it certainly deserves that!

Fraser Hooper brings us a very different sort of clowning to Jones & Barnard’s cheery repartee – solemn and silent, for the most part. He’s to be found Lost in St George’s Park, wearing a ridiculously over-sized backpack, carrying a map and looking bemused. Where is he trying to get to? Does he need help? As he turns the map around, he spins 180 degrees and careers into passers-by. Some people laugh, some look cross, some try to ignore him – which is ridiculous. How can you ignore a man with a backpack so big it takes up the width of the path? At one point, the silent mime speaks: a woman points out that his map is of the Lake District so not much use here in Yarmouth. ‘It’s the only one I have,’ he says with a sad shrug before moving on….   

 And yet more clowning, of another sort: comedian Paul Currie works a seafront crowd with fabulous skill and enormous energy. Objects play a key role, as Currie riffs wildly on one theme after another, moving on at a breathless pace. Gloves and glove puppets singing “She Gloves You’ and ‘Glove to Glove You Baby’. A boomerang croc shoe. A toy dog stuck onto a keyboard (‘the huskeyboard’). Sometimes no props are needed, it’s just his delighted delivery and our imagination that does the work: ‘the middle aisle in Lidl’ is enough to provoke roars of laughter, as is ‘asparagus pee’. He takes requests, and we end riding invisible dragons in tribute to The NeverEnding Story. A true clown – so upbeat and uplifting, and so very, very funny.

Over to the other end of the spectrum now, the darkest of dark humour, and an edgy French troupe called Compagnie Têtes de Mules (the Company of Mule Heads!) who brought us Parasite Circus, in which a bolshy female bouffon and her sulkily subordinate male companion torture and mutilate a whole troupe of puppet circus characters, all of whom have fabulous names (Pinky Bunny is a favourite). Our two bloodthirsty clowns start on the roof of their decrepit caravan, playing a broken accordion and the strangest looking tuba ever seen, heralding a show score with echoes of Carlos d’Alessio’s soundtrack to the film Delicatessen. They descend, mock the audience, conjure up the puppet performers, and the mini splatter-fest begins. Le sang! Le sang! Bring on the blood! A bendy box splits goes too far, until the poor creature is mercilessly rent asunder, an aerial rig becomes a gallows, and as one unfortunate after another meets their fate, puppet guts splatter the audience. Then, the ripped and torn remnants are unceremoniously binned – accompanied by demonic laughter. I have no idea what the company’s provenance is, or where they trained, but their classic bouffon techniques of laughing unashamedly at ‘death, fear, disease, difference and deformity’ courting a ‘desecration of common sense and the idea of political correctness’ are very much in the tradition of the work of Jacques Lecoq. Grotesque burlesque to the nth degree – a gruesome, carnivalesque success.

There’s most definitely a circus-sideshow vibe at this year’s Out There Festival, and this is echoed in Ava-go-go-ville, a mini festival within the festival on Trafalgar Road, between park and seafront. 

Within this site you’ll find a bar and numerous sideshow attractions, including Professor WM Bligh’s Circus Photo Tent, which invites you to have your picture taken as a circus act – be it knife-thrower, strongman, or trapezist; Willow Phoenix: Electric Hamster Racing (‘time to get competitive, only the fastest hamster will win’); and the Hocus Pocus Unsolicited Advice Bureau caravan hosted by self-discovery gurus ‘Tony’ and ‘Pam’ who are offering Speed Life Coaching and Public Art Therapy. There’s also the ever-popular The Loser’s Arcade – a phantasmagoria of ridiculous neon outfits, and ludicrous games (‘Roll up, roll up – everyone’s a loser!’). A favourite game features children racing in imaginary creature outfits, accompanied by the wonderful Ernesto on trumpet who plays joyfully out-of-tune accompaniments to the music drifting in from the seafront arcades. It all fits in perfectly with the Great Yarmouth seafront vibe, being loud, tacky, glittering and life-affirming. You can’t help but come out giggling.

Returning at night to Ava-go-go-ville, we encountered Paka the Uncredible’s Bag of Snakes, which has a loose connection to Paka’s ongoing interest in addressing the bad image Medusa has received over the years. This theme will manifest more in future developments: for now, Bag of Snakes is presented as a fun fairground activity – an ‘interactive pyro-kinetic, addictive and dangerous game experience for all shoe sizes’. It’s a take on the popular mole-thumping challenge – in this case, the ’snakes’ in the pit, known as The Medusa Misfits, light up, hiss and spit fire as contestants bash away at ever-faster-changing coloured pads. Great fun! Another night-time hit in Ava-go-go-ville is Miniscule of Sound’s The World’s Smallest Nightclub, which is exactly what it says on the tin – as close to a London clubbing experience as you’ll get inside a tiny booth with room for four people. You walk down a red carpet to be met by mirror-shaded bouncers and then led in to the soundproofed box with a live DJ behind glass in his booth, cheering you on. There’s very loud classic club anthems, and just about enough room to dance ecstatically. A joyous experience.

Elsewhere, live music played a key role in this year’s Out There Festival, with styles ranging across a full spectrum: crowd-pleasing party favourites and cover versions; rousing gypsy jazz, ska, and funk; and inventive, wonky, hauntological music made from found objects and played on old broken instruments… Talking of which, here’s Eric Tarantola and his Imaginary Orchestra – seen indoors at the Festival launch at Drill House on Thursday evening, and outdoors on Friday and Saturday. Eric is a tall Frenchman with a wild hairstyle, a gentle mime-clown who plays a homemade guitar/ banjo double-neck and a junk shop old trombone; these looped with the sound of wind-up clocks, metal cutlery and other random objects, which provide a percussive rhythm accompaniment. As the show progresses, he picks up an old mechanical clock from inside a battered suitcase and turns it around to reveal he has integrated a kalimba into the back, allowing him to play a melody to the clock’s beat. Very charming, very French – and like the aforementioned Parasite Circus, reminiscent of the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, as soundtracked by Carlos d’Alessio.

Still on the ‘wonky with homemade contraptions’ side of things come Rimski & Handkerchief with An Afternoon Out. Rimski sits on his Bicycle Piano, an old piano bedecked with artificial flowers, horns and hooters that is attached to a chain-driven tricycle base, pedalling the piano up and down paths and managing some very tight corners. Handkerchief plays the Double Bassicle – which is, as you’d imagine, a similar contraption for her double bass. They sing and play a medley of whimsical old songs: ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’ and, as the dark clouds gather above our heads, ‘Stormy Weather’. At seemingly haphazard moments, they change and shift direction. There are unexpected musical stops and key changes – the pair sometimes shifting in and out of the familiar melodies into (possibly) their own compositions, all perfectly timed to the stop-start and direction changes of their pedalling. Even when they sing ‘It’s Time to Go’ they are followed along the way by a smiling crowd who are ready to give them a push if they get stuck in a pot hole.

A firm favourite of many festivals is the musical walkabout troupe playing Eastern European influenced gypsy jazz and ska. Enter Portuguese troupe Kumpania Algazarra, the ensemble featuring a winning combination of trumpets, tuba, electric guitar and bass, drums and percussion. They were kept pretty busy throughout the festival. Wearing matching coloured hoodies and shades, they processed along the seafront, gathering a large and enthusiastic audience along the way. They played the park stages; they led off the Grand Finale procession; and they entertained at the late-night Festival Lounge at The Drill House. It was impossible to miss them! They are great musicians playing tight, funky versions of classic hits and Eastern European and Latin standards, interacting well with their audience – a definite crowd pleaser.

Another crowd-pleasing act is Loveboat – inspired by the TV series of the same name, and featuring two men dressed in short-sleeved merchant navy outfits, one playing keyboards, the other singing and occasionally playing guitar to backing tracks of rave/disco bangers, with a touch of 80s easy listening cheese, all accompanied by over-the-top dance routines and flashing disco lights. Loveboat is a heady brew, evoking a disco party night on a Mediterranean cruise ship featuring exotic cocktails. Like Kumpania Algazarra, they certainly sang for their supper: they played the main music stage in Party in the Park, a small intimate set in Ava-go-go-ville, and entertained the late-night revellers at The Drill House.

A thumbs-up too for the Young Out There (YOT) musicians, who had their own stage on one side of the park, but also took over the main stage now and again. Some of the acts we caught included Oasis-inspired Parallax, head-banging rockers Kuiper, and alt-rock/punk band Amourette. All three had endless energy, and held the crowd’s attention throughout their sets – and it was good to see the young bands take to the main stage with confidence, with such a supportive local crowd to-hand. One YOT act we sadly missed was Terran Burrell, who plays Shruti box, blending its drone sound with vocals to create a neo-folk set – with a few video game soundtracks blended in, apparently! But good to learn that there are young people out there at Out There choosing more unusual musical instruments and influences.

Music also, quite naturally, played an important part in many of the dance shows seen. Vanhulle Dance Theatre’s Olive Branch is performed by two martial-arts trained contemporary dancers who balance on roughly-hewn logs, playfully demonstrating a need to work together – there’s a message there, for sure. They merge expert equilibrist skills, stunning martial arts moves, smooth contemporary dance/contact duets, and gentle clowning to create an enjoyable and well-received show – which was developed in Yarmouth at The Drill House, with the support of Out There Arts. The music, composed by Italian jazz guitarist Domenico Angarano (who has previously worked with renowned choreographers Akram Kahn and Hofesh Schechter), was the perfect accompaniment to the skilled physical performance. 

An unexpected delight of the 2024 dance programme, also featuring a great musical score, was a small but perfectly-formed piece by two teenage artists, collectively known as Stacked Wonky, who hail from rural Somerset. 4 Minutes starts with our young male performers approaching from afar, walking down the centre of the road carrying chairs. These are placed behind a wooden table stood in the middle of the street. There follows a breathtaking ten minutes of beat-the-clock game-playing, alternating between collaboration and competition as the table is laid upon and leapt over, chairs spun like skipping ropes to be hopped over. In quieter moments, a gestural dance-theatre vocabulary of ticks and touches and shrugs is played out, T-shirts pulled up over heads, small glances exchanged. It’s a truly lovely piece of dance-theatre work, with the added bonus of a great live music accompaniment, featuring the beautiful electronic looping viola of Argentinian composer and multi-instrumentalist, Sebastian Tesouro.

Collectif Bim’s Place Assis (which translates as ‘a place to sit’) is a non-verbal performance set on a public bench. It’s a well-played piece of ensemble physical theatre, with the five performers imaginatively transforming the aforementioned bench into a car, boat or horse. There’s a fair bit of ‘school’s out’ type romping, with bags stolen and chucked around, and a lot of pushing and shoving and chasing round and round, all cleverly choreographed. It’s not going to change the world, but it’s a fun piece of work that goes down well with the audience.

Gorilla Circus are best known for their aerial work, but for this edition of the festival, they presented RPM – a dance, acrobatics and rollerskating piece set on a moving treadmill. Because of the unseasonably cold weather, it did feel hard to stay still and connected for a 45-minute-long static show, on in the park at 8pm. That said, the section seen (before the cold got too much, sending us scurrying to The Drill House) was a breathtaking display of acrobatic skill and co-ordination. And Gorilla Circus are to be applauded for trying something that’s new to them. There’s also the need for companies to produce work of different scales for touring – and as so much of their repertoire is large-scale, requiring a lot of rigging space, here’s a show that is more easily tourable, suitable for indoors or out.

Other circus companies seen at this year’s festival included Belgium-based 15Feet6 with Primus, a collaboration between Finnish Cyr wheel specialist Rosa Tyyskä, and the equally skilled Belgian Jasper D’Hondt who specialises in acrobatic bicycle and roller-skating. The 2020 lock-down forced the couple off the international touring circuit and into collaboration with each other – Primus being the result. And what a result – it really is a gem of a show, exploiting the performers’ skills beautifully. 

The pair are dressed in a kind of neutral school uniform (grey shorts/short skirt with white shirts) and the show plays out a love-hate competitive schoolyard friendship, starting slowly and building beautifully. In the beginning, they work the crowd, with two young volunteers co-opted to give out raffle tickets for a school-fete style tombola, the draw of which goes with a bang (literally). In a kind of parody of playground tactics, they each demonstrate their respective skills – aided, abetted or undermined by the other. Rosa zips around with extraordinary ease on her Cyr wheel; Jasper counters with a mocking hula-hoop act. Jasper hops on his bike and demonstrates some fabulous tricks; Rosa leaps on with him, shoving her behind in his face, or jumping up on his back. After lots of running jokes about their roller skates (Jasper’s are almost given away by Rosa in the tombola!), they don their wheels for a superb roller-skating doubles finale – fantastically fast and furious, demonstrating wonderful partner work, all rivalry now dropped and everything all about the two working as one. Primus was certainly one of the outstanding shows of Out There 2024.   

More rollerskating: Dulce Duca’s Unstoppable at first purports to be a one-woman show. Duca, resplendent in an extraordinary purple tulle outfit, channels her inner diva, strutting around full of herself and her accomplishments, demonstrating her club-juggling and roller-skating skills, and building a brilliant repartee with her audience – the juggling challenged a little by the fierce winds blowing, but she overcomes all obstacles. All obstacles, that is, except a late-arriving audience member who walks across the performance space and fussily seats herself, arranging her shopping trolley by her side. Then the fun and games start, as the annoying woman (who we soon realise is a plant – played by actress Tsubi Du) starts to disrupt the show – subtly at first, but later running into the space to grab clubs and jam them into her trolley. It all gets more and more farcical, and builds to a suitably ludicrous climax, with Duca and her combatant finally united in a ritual task – the funeral for the broken clubs. Unstoppable is a very sweet play on the challenges of performing outdoors, a space where anything can happen and probably will – wild winds, squally showers, dogs on strings, drunken old geezers, mouthy teens, crying babies, and bolshy old ladies with shopping trolleys disrupting the space! Street theatre queen Dulce Duca sees off all disruptions and reigns supreme. A master (or is that ‘mistress’?) class in crowd control.

Finally, we come to the The Final Grand Finale – the very last shows ever for local heroes The Insect Circus.

The Insect Circus was created by partners in life and work, Mark Copeland and Sarah Munro. The project has seen many incarnations, from painting exhibition, to travelling museum, to indoor show, to outdoor show. Very many different circus artists have been involved over the years and many are back for the grand finale – the show has been revived after a five-year hiatus, to be retired again after the Festival, this time for good! 

So here we are: this is the end.

This incarnation of the show has a cast of 25 drawn from across the country, and indeed from across the world. Many of the old favourites are back. Pippa Coram (all the way from Australia) is the hula-hooping Albina the Awesome, accompanied by a brace of lurid green praying mantises.  Simon Deville is Western skills maestro The Great Flingo, pinning the poor unsuspecting butterfly to a board to the tune of the ‘Bonanza’ theme tune, and ‘Don’t Hem Me In’. Marcos Rivas Farpon is Mr Maroc, taming the wild and beastly Sylvester the Stag Beetle with a dash of classic matador Paso Doble, assisted by Flamenco dancer The Delightful Dolores. Phoebe Babette Baker performs as Phee and her Bee on the tightwire (when the wind dies down for long enough, anyway); and Ashling Deeks brings Dungo the balancing scarab beetle out of retirement. Dungo’s trainer, Peggy Babcock IV, is played by Persephone Pearl, who also reprises her turn as the back end of a pantomime horse (at least, I think it’s her in there – it’s hard to tell). But there is also the next generation: aerialist Vicky McManus is returning with her daughter Saskia Poulter for the Mothball Bolero and other aerial acts; and two of the younger members of the team play aerialists Molly and Dolly Lollipop, performing a very lovely doubles hoop act. Mark is ringmaster, pulling it all together, and Sarah plays Nursey, on hand in case of insect bites and stings (Pemma Ricardo, aka Constance Courage, keeps control of the Vicious Vespa Wasps, but they have been known to run amok). Nursey also does her own short act as a warm-up before the main show – The Mighty Mites Tea Party, a fabulous little puppetry show in which the eponymous mites behave very badly indeed. 

We must also give a mention to the fabulous Sybil the Snail, a giant beast who, unlike the other creatures of the circus, will possibly not be sent off to be cryogenically frozen in A(n) Ice House, but will live on as the Out There Arts mascot…  

It was Sybil who led off the grand parade for the Community Carnival on Saturday evening, in celebration of the Ice House, and honouring 20 years of The Insect Circus – a wonderful finale to Out There Festival 2024. The Festival’s musical troupes, including Kumpania Algazarra and classical string-quartet Bowjangles, joined forces to provide a rip-roaring live soundtrack; artists and volunteers at the Festival processed from The Drill House to the park waving colourful flags; and The Insect Circus creatures took their final final bows before being ceremoniously retired, leaving the children and grandchildren of the company in the ring hula-hooping.

Perhaps, muses ringmaster Mark to us afterwards, the grandchildren will one day take up the baton and ‘unfreeze’ the insects. Until then, it’s the end of an era for The Insect Circus, but the start of a new one for Out There Festival – the Spring slot having been well and truly christened.

The show must go on, the show will go on – here’s to May 2025! 

Featured image (top): Compagnie Têtes de Mules Parasite Circus. Photo James Bass Photography

This year’s edition of Out There International Festival of Outdoor Arts and Circus ran 30 May to 1 June 2024. 

More About Out There Arts – National Centre for Outdoor Arts & Circus

Great Yarmouth based, but collaborating internationally, Out There Arts – National Centre for Outdoor Arts & Circus is a registered charity and Arts Council funded National Portfolio Organisation dedicated to supporting excellence in the development, creation and presentation of new and high quality artistic work, delivery of outstanding circus and outdoor arts festivals, and events for and with diverse local communities and wider audiences.

Out There Arts shares Great Yarmouth’s vision to become the UK Capital of Circus. Their focus on circus and outdoor arts grows naturally from this seaside town’s rich performance heritage, providing an accessible medium to support their work.

www.outtherearts.org.uk 

Fresh Street at Out There Festival 2025

Fresh Street – The International Event for the Development of Outdoor Arts is back for its fifth edition on 28–30 May 2025. This flagship professional meeting bringing together key European and international players, artists, programmers, producers, researchers, and policy-makers from for three days of dynamic discussions and stimulating exchanges on how we can imagine the outdoor arts of tomorrow.

Fresh Street #5 is co-organised by Circostrada Network and Out There Arts in the frame of Out There Festival, in partnership with Outdoor Arts UK.

https://www.circostrada.org/en

More About the Ice House

A Grade II listed building of brick construction with a thatched roof, the Great Yarmouth Ice House, once one of a pair, is now the only one of its kind left in the country. 

Out There Arts have a vision to transform it into a National Centre for Outdoor Arts and Circus. This imaginative and creative use of the building will further develop the town’s reputation as the capital of circus in the UK as well as further link the town’s fishing and circus heritage.

All funding is now in place, with the project supported by the Architectural Heritage Fund and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England, Great Yarmouth Borough Council, and the building’s former owners Towns Deal Brineflow.

Capital works began in February 2024, and is scheduled for completion in March 2025, in time for Out There Festival 2025.

See www.outtherearts.org.uk 

The Insect Circus Museum

The show may be finished, but The Insect Museum lives on! Now in permanent residence at a house in Great Livermore, Suffolk IP31 1JN. Visits by appointment. Contact Mark Copeland on: theinsectcircus@gmail.com 

This year’s Out There International Festival of Street Arts and Circus in Great Yarmouth has a distinct carnivalesque vibe – channelling the sideshow traditions and popular entertainment tropes of days of yore, writes Dorothy Max Prior

Circus, street theatre, music, interactive game playing, and outdoor arts of all sorts across Great Yarmouth’s streets, parks and venues. Yes, here we are again – another Out There Festival. They come round quickly! But hang on – it doesn’t feel like a year since the last one. Which is because it isn’t – the Festival has moved from September to the spring half-term holiday weekend at the end of May/beginning of June, meaning that the 2024 edition comes hot on the heels of the last one in Autumn 2023.

‘It’s been hard work and something of a rush,’ says executive director Veronica Stephens. ‘I had a short holiday after wrapping up the last one, then it was Christmas, and then – countdown to the next one!’

But they’ve done it – bravo. Artistic director Joe Mackintosh, Veronica, and their team of bright young producers and administrators have somehow pulled it all off. And that’s whilst also instigating the development of the Ice House – a massive project that will see the building developed into a multi-use community arts venue and a national centre of excellence for circus and outdoor arts training and creation for Yarmouth.

And it’s another great line-up for Out There this year, with the usual mix of local, national and international work of all scales – although this time round the festival is a little more contained, starting on Thursday evening with Party in the Park and some indoor shows; then bursting out all over the town on Friday 31 May and Saturday 1 June, but with a substantial amount of community engagement leading up to that action-packed weekend programme.

One of the shows I’m most excited about is the return of the legendary Insect Circus: We thought they’d retired, but the insects and their trainers are back for one final extravaganza … The Final Grand Finale, in fact –  staged on the Friday and Saturday evening of the festival in the Park. 

The Insect Circus was created by partners in life and work, Mark Copeland and Sarah Munro. Both are visual artists with a theatrical bent. Mark is a BAFTA winning designer (for his work on the BBC series Gormenghast). His work as a maker and painter can be seen in Yarmouth at Out There’s headquarters at the Drill House – it was he who designed the fabulous ‘giant paper theatre’ proscenium stage for the venue, and his legendary pink snail painting hangs on the venue’s wall. Sarah is a sought-after costume designer, these days well known for her work with theatre company 1927. The couple have a longstanding relationship with the Festival, having brought numerous shows to previous editions, including The Equidae Retirement Home for Pantomime Horses, set in the windows of  Palmers department store; and Miss O’ Genie’s Dazzling Dollirama, in which Miss O’Genie and her Damnable Dolls presented an alternative approach to a coconut shy, giving us a chance to throw things at famous misogynists. 

‘They have an amazing ability to reflect on circus and theatre work of the past and give it a modern twist’ says Joe.

The Insect Circus started life as a set of paintings by Mark Copeland – giving us such wondrous images as ‘a giant stag beetle closing its jaws around Mr. Maroc the Beast Tamer, two ladybirds drawing a pram with a clown inside, and the Great Flingo outlining the fragile wings of a butterfly with thrown knives’. (As eloquently described in an interview with Mark in Sideshow Circus Magazine) 

Then came The Insect Circus Museum, an installation housed in a specially modified truck – an old horse box kitted out like a vintage gypsy caravan – which toured to festivals. Audience members entered in two’s and threes to find a fabulous display of carefully crafted figurines, skilful automata, letterpress posters and other printed ephemera celebrating the daring-do’s of the fleas, butterflies, wasps and ants who were the stars of this allegedly world-renowned circus. ‘Cabaret Mechanical’ style boxes lit up when buttons were pushed to reveal the teeny performers in action: snarling wasps are tamed; fleas hop in acrobatic harmony; and The Peaple, a Liverpool-based bug band, sing their little hearts out. The installation was finally retired as a touring show a year or two ago, and is now housed in its own specially designed ‘museum’ at Great Livermore in Suffolk.

A couple of years after the installation was set up came the idea of a live show, with circus and cabaret artists taking on insect roles, wearing beautiful costumes designed by Sarah. I particularly remember the show at London’s beautiful old music hall venue, The Hoxton Hall, featuring a lovely aerial act that told the sad story of the Mayfly, who only lives for one day… 

Many different artists were involved over the years – the show is almost a roll-call for Britain’s contemporary circus and variety community. Lots of those legendary names are back for the grand finale – the show is being revived, but then immediately retired again. It’s a catch-it-if-you-can last chance scenario! Mark and Sarah put a call-out to anyone and everyone who had ever been involved, with the idea of bringing 12 performers together. They’ve ended up with 25 travelling to Yarmouth to take part. ‘And that’s not including the children,’ says Mark, who goes on to tell me that one performer, Pippa Coram (aka Albina the Awesome), is coming all the way from Australia for the show! There’s also Simon Deville as The Great Flingo, Marcos Rivas Farpon as Mr Maroc (expect some Iberian stag-beetle wrestling), and Safia Amalgharabi as Talullah the Worm Charmer. Aerialist Vicky McManus is returning with her daughter Saskia Poulter for the Mothball Bolero, Phoebe Babette Baker will perform as Phee and her Bee on the tightwire, and Ashling Deeks brings Dungo out of retirement. Then there’s Dungo’s trainer, Peggy Babcock IV, played by company stalwart Persephone Pearl, who was last (un)seen as the back end of a pantomime horse… 

This year’s festival will also see another Insect Circus associate Marisa Carnesky on the bill – one of the few indoor shows on the programme, her magnificent Marisa Carnesky’s Showwomen is on Thursday 30th and Friday 31st at the Hippodrome – Britain’s legendary oldest purpose-built circus venue.

Joe tells me that programming in to the Hippodrome fulfils a longstanding ambition: ’We used to put some shows in there,’ he says. ‘But then the Hippodrome’s summer show season was extended, so September was no longer possible – but with our change of dates to May, it is now possible. And it is our intention going forward that we do have a show in the Hippodrome each season. Something that does span the popular and contemporary worlds. With the Ice House opening next year, we hope to build on our indoor programme ’. 

Showwomen is a spectacular four-woman show researched and directed by Marisa Carnesky It has been created in collaboration with Veronica Thompson (aka hair-hanger extraordinaire Fancy Chance), performance poet and sword artist Livia Kojo Alour, and ‘fire lady’ and suspension artist Lucifire. The show asks: What happens to the showgirl when she grows up? And why and how do women perform dangerous and taboo acts? The four contemporary circus/live art performers explore their own showwomen circus and sideshow practices with reference to the legacy of forgotten and marginalised British entertainers; taking as inspiration 1880s teeth hanging aerialist superstar Miss La La, 1930s pioneer clown Lulu Adams, 1940s body magic star Koringa, and 1950s Western skilled performer Florence Shufflebottom. The show interweaves live action, in-depth interviews and archival footage to create a dreamlike landscape mixing death-defying stunts, taboo-breaking acts, notions of political resistance, and secret backstage rituals. ‘Expect witchy goings-on in full leopard-print, naked crocodile women scaling walls, ladders of swords, live hair-hanging, never-ending pom poms and ectoplasmic clowns,’ says Marisa.

Back to the outdoor programme: something that immediately caught my attention was Compagnie Têtes de Mules (great name!) with Parasite Circus, which promises ‘fairground theatre, smoking, nudity, loud bangs, buffoons, and hideous puppets’. An irresistible combination, I’d say.

‘They’re a French company, and it’s real street theatre, ‘ says Joe. ‘There’s a bit of a lack of that on the European circuit at the moment, with a lot of the work dance or circus based. Têtes de Mules combine a contemporary arts sensibility with popular entertainment values. Blood spurts over the audience – it’s a lot of fun! Dark humour, we like that!’

Ah, so a tie-in with Marisa Carnesky’s Showwomen and The Insect Circus – adding to the carnivalesque circus-sideshow vibe of this year’s Out There Festival. ‘Exploring the sideshow tradition in a contemporary way,’ as Joe puts it. 

Also with something of a sideshow vibe comes legendary maker Paka the Uncredible, who is returning to Out There Festival with Bag of Snakes, addressing the bad image Medusa has received over the years… 

‘Paka will be part of what we’re calling the Ava-go-goville,’ says Veronica. 

This bespoke zone will be sited on one of the greens in the town, between park and seafront, and will feature contemporary mock-amusement-arcade type interactive entertainments. The Losers Arcade (a big hit in 2023) will be back, along with the  Miniscule of Sound’s World’s Smallest Nightclub, and Professor WM Bligh’s Circus Photo Tent.

Also channelling the carnivalesque will be perennial favourites Rimski and Handkerchief, the musical clown duo who will roam the streets of Yarmouth on their pedal-powered Bicycle Piano and Double Bassicle. We are invited to accompany Rimski & Handkerchief as they pedal, plonk and play their way through some of Out There’s key locations, singing songs of timeless wonder, en route to a favourite picnic spot for An Afternoon Out – which will no doubt see them setting out their stall of bric-a-brac and wondrous objects of all sorts.

Great also to see that local supported artists and Festival favourites CocoLoco are back again, this time with Mafia Wedding, which will engage students from local performing arts colleges as bridal entourage and wedding guest extras. The show tells the tale of a mafia boss with a pregnant daughter in urgent need of a groom (not to mention a bridesmaid, a priest, and a congregation) for a shotgun wedding about to take place! Out There have been instrumental in moving CocoLoco on from their classic two-handers to larger ensemble shows, often working with community performers and students, for example in last year’s show Shangri-la-la, which is now touring in the UK and elsewhere.

‘They’ve got an amazing wealth of experience and knowledge [in street arts and performance] and we’ve been hooking them up with younger artists and students for quite a long while now,’ says Joe.

Another company who have received consistent support over the years from the Festival is Gorilla Circus, who this year have been artists-in-residence at the Drill House, the organisation’s year-round venue, and take a new direction when they return to Out There Festival 2024 not with flying trapeze, high-wire or hair-hanging – as seen in a previous outings to Yarmouth such as their large-scale show Unity.This time, it’s a ground-based show, RPM.

‘It’s more urban dance than circus – no aerial at all this time,’ says Veronica. So, dance acrobatics and rollerskating – all staged on a moving treadmill.

‘Thematically, it’s exploring the repercussions and recovery from colonialism,’ says Joe. ‘And with some really unusual movement work – a really strong piece.’

‘Unity was the show they developed after they’d had the experience of working with Generik Vapeur,’ says Veronica. (Gorilla Circus worked with French maestros Generik Vapeur on Bivouac and Merci pour l’Accueil.)

 ‘Unity has spoken word, working with a poet, and is a political piece – moving away from the spectacle; the ooohs and the aaahs. Meaningful and very moving’

Gorilla Circus are based in the region and are now an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.

 ‘We’ve helped them on the road – and are helping get their work out in Europe,’ says Joe. ‘They are touring Unity now – but also creating work in new directions (such as RPM) rather than staying with the familiar. We’ve always encouraged them to explore a greater range of artistic forms and to experiment with scale. Unity is a work of scale, but cleverly designed, so transportable. But they have smaller scale works too, which is good.’ 

Also on the circus and dance front, we have a good number of strong international shows. 

Primus, by Belgium-based 15Feet6, is a collaboration between Finnish Cyr wheel specialist Rosa Tyyskä (formerly of Cirque du Soleil and the Finnish female collective Sisus), and the equally busy and skilled Belgian Jasper D’Hondt who specialises in teeterboard, Russian bar, acrobatic bicycle and acrobatic roller skating. The 2020 lock-down forced the couple off the international touring circuit and into collaboration with each other – and the bicycle-for-two show Primus was the result!

Collectif Bim”s Place Assis (which translates as ‘a place to sit’) is a non-verbal performance that explores the ways people behave on public benches – and the way they interact with each other, the five performers challenging the norms that rule public spaces and social relationships.

Portuguese born (but Yarmouth based) Dulce Duca – juggler, rollerskater and street performer extraordinaire – is back with Unstoppable – a two-woman show, first made with Sarah Munro for the Bartholomew Fair in London, and on this occasion performed  with Tsubi Du from Australia – a costume designer and actress now based in Norwich, which Joe says will be ‘highly participatory’ and a ‘classic piece of street theatre, drawing people more and more into the show’. Which I can well believe: I first met Duca in Guadalajara when we were both performing with the Ficho Festival Caravana, where I witnessed her taming gangs of Mexican teens in some of Guadalajara’s more deprived neighbourhoods, training them to throw her clubs or allow her to balance on their shoulders.

Joe points out that participation and inclusion – always key components to Out There Festival – will take centre-stage at next year’s Festival, which will have participation and  inclusion as its theme, and will see a collaboration with international circus and street arts organisation Circostrada, with the Fresh conference welcoming a large cohort of international delegates, and an enlarged Festival in May 2025. 

But back to 2024: I’ve also noticed some interesting musical acts lined up: the Imaginary Orchestra, for example.

‘That’s Eric Tarantola,’ says Veronica. ‘I saw him at Chalons [French street theatre festival] and he is very engaging – simple and effective – a one-man-band using everyday objects to make good quality music.’

‘You’ll remember that we had a focus last year on music within circus and street arts,’ says Joe. ‘We’ve long championed the more unusual musical forms, that fit with the festival, and Eric is a good example.’

Veronica also flags up Kumpania Algazarra – a Portuguese company of musicians who bring together high energy jazz, Latin and Balkan rhythms, with both a static show and a processional walkabout act.

’They’re great at interventions in public space – parading around, jumping into arcades and cafes,’ says Veronica. ‘We feel that they’ll engage well with the Portuguese speaking community in Great Yarmouth’. For indeed, there are very many of those in the area – people from Portugal, although more likely from Angola, Mozambique or other former colonial territories.

This year’s Out There Festival will also see the launch of YOT – Young Out There – recognising what Joe describes as ‘the upswelling of youth music and grassroots music here in Yarmouth, which we’ve helped to develop in tandem with the Creative People and Places’ Freshly Greated programme. We hosted a season of gigs – GIGGY – in the autumn. We had a reach out to the community to find young bands and musicians, and we wanted to find some more unusual ways and means for them to perform at the Festival. Some of the  young musicians had submitted videos of themselves rapping in cars, so we thought – let’s get a car!’

Hence, getting an old scrapped car that could be be graffiti’d: somewhere other than a regular stage where young artists could perform – in, around or upon! The car will be in the park throughout the Festival, as part of the YOT programme. 

Also part of the outreach programme is the now established relationship with East Norfolk Sixth Form College, who will host a week-long programme of workshops, training sessions and seminars run by Out There artists, attended not just by the students of the Sixth Form College, but by participants from a number of local schools and colleges – with over 1,000 young people taking part.

The organisation’s communications and audience development manager, Marcin Rodwell, who leads on access for Out There, flags up the SEND festival (Special Educational Needs) programme – now linked in to Out There Festival, as using the Festival’s resources seems to make sense! So Out There opened their doors to the collaboration. And it’s a two-way process:

‘They help us with our access offer,’ Marcin says. ‘They will be providing British Sign Language interpreters and audio description, touch tours and more.’ 

Marcin also flags up the ongoing heritage training and outreach programme for the Ice House, which once played a crucial role in Great Yarmouth’s fishing industry. They are working with 11 schools and three local colleges,  running workshops and enabling participants to create art work in response to the site’s heritage.

‘Participants are making a creative response using different artforms,’ says Marcin. ‘That could be photography, literature, film, game design, sound design…’

Veronica mentions the Out There professional programme, which will take place at the Drill House from Thursday 30th onwards, with informal meet-and-greets, drinks receptions, and sessions run by Outdoor Arts UK, the national organisation for all professionals working in the sector – artists, producers, programmers and more. 

So once again, the Out There International Festival of Street Arts and Circus is going to be a hub of activity of all sorts. Get out there, do!

Out There Festival runs 30 May to 1 June 2024. View the programme here. 

More About Out There Arts

Great Yarmouth based, but collaborating internationally, Out There Arts is an independent arts development charity dedicated to delivering outstanding circus and street arts events. 

Their focus on circus and street arts grows naturally from this seaside town’s rich performance heritage, providing an accessible medium to support their work. 

The organisation delivers an arts development function for Great Yarmouth Borough Council, developing the town as an International Centre of Excellence for circus and street arts creation, training and delivery.

More About the Ice House

A Grade II listed building of brick construction with a thatched roof, the Great Yarmouth Ice House, once one of a pair, is now the only one of its kind left in the country. 

Out There Arts have a vision to transform it into a National Centre for Outdoor Arts and Circus. This imaginative and creative use of the building will further develop the town’s reputation as the capital of circus in the UK as well as further link the town’s fishing and circus heritage.

All funding is now in place, with the project supported by the Architectural Heritage Fund and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England, Great Yarmouth Borough Council, and the building’s former owners Towns Deal Brineflow.

Capital works began in February 2024, and is scheduled for completion in March 2025, in time for Out There Festival 2025.

See www.outtherearts.org.uk 

‘What is a memorial device? Is it like a pocket watch that you’ve inherited? Is it like a gravestone? Or is it more like a dictaphone – a dictaphone where you can record your memories? Is it like a marker in the sand? What is a memorial device?’

This is Ross Raymond speaking. He’s invited us here, to this theatre, to celebrate and commemorate Memorial Device. Ross wants to share his memories of the band with an audience who may or may not remember them, too; for us, collectively, to rediscover these experiences in a ritualistic manner. ‘I can’t do this without you,’ he says. ‘You are the final element of this ritual, this spell.’

I’m sure you do remember the band, am I right? Well, if you’re of a certain age, anyway. From Lanarkshire in Scotland (Airdrie, specifically)? Made waves – industrial strength waves, to be precise – in the early- to mid-1980s? Kind of a cross between garage band psychedelia and Krautrock? Although it’s hard to pin-point their sound exactly…

And yes, after performances of the newly re-staged theatre show, This is Memorial Device, or after readings from the book of the same name that it is drawn from, by acclaimed Scottish author David Keenan, people do come up and share their memories of the band – or even suggest point-of-information corrections about which band members lived where in Airdrie, and who did what back in the day.

There’s only one problem with this: the band never existed. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that the band only exists in the imagination of David Keenan – and nowadays also in the heads of the very many people who have read the book sometime over the past seven years, or engaged with the very many Memorial Device manifestations in the real or virtual world, which include the theatrical adaptation (touring Spring 2024), the numerous fan-fiction tributes, and the band’s Twitter/X account – which has nothing at all to do with David Keenan, but has an independent life of its own. So Memorial Device have been conjured up into the world, as if by magick. They exist as much as anything else exists in our memories and imaginations. And who on earth knows where memory ends and imagination begins?

‘People do think it is real,’ says David. ‘I’m interested in how you can retrospectively affect people’s memories.’  

David’s novel is a fabulous smorgasbord of first-person accounts that can be read as stand-alone short stories, but taken together add up to a history of the mysterious and legendary Memorial Device and the post-punk and alternative arts scene of Airdrie and surrounding districts in 1983 and 1984. A history, yes, but not a definitive one. There are numerous narrators, reliable and unreliable. There are conflicting accounts, and incidents are revisited from multiple viewpoints throughout. 

‘The book is unfathomable,’ says David. ‘There is no bottom to get to. You don’t solve the mystery of Memorial Device. The reason This Is Memorial Device is so alive seven years after publication is that it is a living, growing entity.’ He says that readers could read the stories in any order they wished; and, gleefully approving of the fact that I found it hard to keep up with all the characters and events in the book, suggests that I re-read it from the end story back to the beginning. ‘It’s designed like an ouroboros – when it ends, you can begin again. There are multiple entry and exit points.’

I’ll say also that it all feels true to life because it is. The characters and plots might be fiction, but it’s informed by David’s own experiences growing up in Airdrie in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and his involvement in the post-punk music scene. So all the details – the houses people live in, the objects in their homes, the bands, the music, the rehearsal rooms, the venues, the weird makeshift art installations and zines and happenings – all live and breathe. There’s a real sense of emotional truth and lived experience at the heart of it all. And despite a few harrowing incidents, and the background of tough working lives and lurking violence or abuse, the overall feel is one of optimism – a ‘let’s say yes to life’ vibe that is ever-present.

‘The book is all about possibility,’ says David. ‘Things were so incredible then, post punk, especially in small working-class towns. The avant-garde was on the street – it really felt like anything was possible.’

Book, and theatrical adaptation, also serve as psychogeographic journeys to an Airdrie that no longer exists. The opening shot in the show is of a grainy photograph of David playing guitar, back in the 1980s. A photo taken by schoolfriend Martin Clark, who happens coincidentally (and what is coincidence, after all) to have come on board as the show’s video maker. Still photos are a crucial element of the show’s scenography.

‘For the past 25 years, I’ve been photographing Airdrie with absolutely no goal in mind,’ says David. ‘I’d go there and drive around and take black-and-white photos of streets and cafes and houses – often unpopulated shots. The Airdrie that exists in those photos is gone now…’ 

Which prompts another interesting reflection: photo as memorial device. The camera captures a second, and that image replaces any memories we might otherwise have had of that moment in time. The stage show uses those images, projected as a backdrop: ‘It’s remarkable how it has all come together’.

Sometimes we don’t know why we are doing something, but the reason emerges much later. It’s an argument in favour of instinct-led art making. As David puts it, ‘artistry is uncovering, finding out what the piece wants to be, rather than going in with a fixed idea of what it will be’.

‘OK. Why am I doing this? I’m doing it because of Memorial Device. I’m doing this to stand up for Airdrie…I’m doing it because for a moment, when everything seemed impossible, everyone was doing everything – reading, listening, writing, creating, sticking up posters, passing out, throwing up, rehearsing rehearsing rehearsing in dark windowless rooms, like the future was just up ahead… and now already it’s the rotten past, isn’t it?’ – Ross Raymond

This is Memorial Device is not your regular kind of theatrical adaptation of a novel. It’s a piece of collaboratively made total theatre that merges first-person storytelling, ritual, quirky choreography, striking visual imagery, and video and photo projection; with a musical score developed in tandem with the other elements. 

The starting point came pre-pandemic when writer/director Graham Eatough mentioned to David Greig – Suspect Culture collaborator and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh – that he had read and loved This is Memorial Device, and would be interested in musing on ways the novel could be adapted to a stage show. Graham had previously worked with David Greig and Nick Powell on the stage adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1981 novel Lanark, presented at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2015. 

Graham was a friend of musician Stephen McRobbie of Glasgow band The Pastels – also known as Stephen Pastel – who is a longtime fan of This is Memorial Device and a friend of David Keenan.

‘I felt that if David was on board, I’d be happy to be as well,’ says Stephen. ‘It is such an incredible novel that I wanted that affirmation from David. As it happens, Graham and David got on like a house on fire. And we all agreed that we wanted the show to keep the intensity of the book – we really didn’t want it to be lightweight nostalgia for the 1980s.’

The three worked together to create an initial workshop and a reading with music, presented at the Royal Lyceum Theatre’s Playing With Books slot at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. This experience gave them the impetus to pursue the project into a full theatrical adaption – and prompted the Lyceum to commission the work.

‘It was great to work with the author; the primary source,’ says Graham. ‘David was so generous with his material. The book invites you to reconsider your own experiences of this time… Adapting became a process of selection and amplification. The book has so many different voices in it, and so many different stories in it, that the process of selection was really challenging!’

Which is understandable, as the book has 26 different stories, mostly narrated by different characters – although it starts with Ross Raymond, would-be music journalist and zine editor, who is one of the few to get more than one story in the book. 

The solution was to make Ross Raymond the narrator of the theatre piece – although with some material filched from another character, Johnny McLaughlin. Ross, played by renowned Scottish actor Paul Higgins, is the only onstage performer – other characters are represented on-screen. 

‘Paul is absolutely magical,’ says Graham. ‘He has been completely central to the project, and really owns it. He’s around the same age [of the story’s main characters] with a similar background and some comparable experiences. He loves the book, and he’s bought into the idea of really doing something extraordinary in collaboration with the audience for that hour and a quarter they are together.’

So, no fourth walls here! The fact that Paul once trained for the priesthood is probably an added bonus when it comes to creating a sense of communion and shared ritual with the audience. It turns out that Ross has his own agenda that is slightly different to that stated at the beginning, this revealed as the show progresses, but that is for the audience to experience and discover.

So Ross and his, and our, relationship to Memorial Device is at the heart of the show, with some other elements of the novel necessarily sacrificed. 

‘A lot of our favourite stories aren’t in the show,’ says Graham, ‘because we had to be true to our chosen narrative; to put the real-time onstage storyteller Ross at the heart of the 75-minute show.’

It’s a wise decision – to give time and space to the limited amount of chosen material, rather than trying to shoehorn in too much. And although the focus is on Ross’s memories of Memorial Device, we never actually get to hear the music the band made.

‘One of the things that was always on my mind is that there shouldn’t be any music by Memorial Device in the production,’ says David. ‘Everyone has their own Memorial Device and I don’t think any music could live up to the idea people have of them in their head. Stephen and collaborator Gavin Thomson did this really well – worked around it somehow, without overtly stating it.’

Stephen talks of the process of creating the score, which evolved in tandem with all the other elements of the production, in consultation with Graham and David – so a truly collaborative venture. 

Stephen learnt, after the Playing with Books workshop, that it would be crucial to get trusted sound designer and technician Gavin, who he has worked with on Pastels live gigs, on board. And Gavin became far more than a technician:

‘Gav always does The Pastels live sound. He’s easy to be around and great with sound – and he’s a problem-solver, no tantrums. With This Is Memorial Device, I suppose we brought him in as our tech but he became a trusted and equal collaborator for me. I’d never worked with him in the studio before this, but will probably do so from now on.’

Stephen started with revisiting old cassette tapes of music he had made in the 1980s – so, music that existed before the book was even written:

‘The first music that I found that I thought fitted was made with my friend Corky [John McCorkindale]. We’d made this stuff as teenagers in his bedroom – usually when very drunk! We had this track called We Have Sex. We were trying to sound like Cabaret Voltaire, but were pretty inept. David heard it and thought it was a masterpiece!’

This and other 1980s pieces aren’t presented in their pure forms in the show, as Stephen says they are ‘too gnarly’, but have been worked into new sound compositions, created with Gavin: ‘There is a lot of beauty in the book and we wanted to bring that out.’  

He cites a track called ‘The Most Beautiful House in Airdrie’, which he describes as reflecting the fact that the house is indeed lovely, but infused with an air of decay. The resulting instrumental piece is a softly melancholic, bittersweet mix that captures the essence of the house perfectly. I see the track as featuring a typical Pastels guitar sound, but Stephen clarifies:

‘Gav and I both wrote chord progressions for ‘The Most Beautiful House In Airdrie’ – both of us on keyboards away from each other, unaware of what the other was doing. Gav played the guitar on this, as I had bad arthritis on the day we recorded it. I think he played it with a nod to my style and we didn’t revisit. I really like his playing! I’m on keyboards and xylophone on this one.’

And yes, elsewhere we get dashes of post-punk, industrial and noise music – but these merging effortlessly into melodic tracks that have more in common with Ryuichi Sakamoto than Throbbing Gristle. Stephen has employed his Pastels bandmates Katrina Mitchell (vocals) and Tom Crossley (flute) together with drummer Jennifer Hamilton; and he has worked with Gavin – a self-declared synth enthusiast – on creating a score that constantly echoes and references the experimenters and garage bands of the 1980s whilst sounding contemporary.

The final track of the show is the one that comes closest to evoking Memorial Device. The theatrical conceit is that it is the last piece of music made by the band’s singer Lucas Black before his death. Lucas has made field recordings outside his home at the break of dawn, and this track, ‘The Morning of the Executioners’, has been subsequently ‘sonically dicked with’ by Lucas’s bandmates, guitarist Patty Pierce and bass player Remy Parr.

‘That final track is euphoric, uplifting, transformative,’ says David ‘Audiences have responded so well to it. It’s a big YES!’

And David likes the word ‘yes’! His favourite ever book ending is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which ends with Molly Bloom saying ‘… yes I said yes I will.’ The on-stage This is Memorial Device similarly ends with a yes – this written in by Graham without him making the Ulysses connection until David pointed it out. Another meaningful coincidence…

‘I’m learning more and more about the book by watching the production,’ says David.

A story from the book that becomes a lynchpin of the show is that of band fan and associate Anthea Anderson. She recalls the Memorial Device rehearsal room under the railway arches, where a train would pass every fifteen minutes and the whole room would shake with this industrial noise: ‘You can hear it on the early recordings’, she says. ‘They said it added to the ambience.’

She goes on to recall a landscape painting on the wall that she said seemed incongruous:

‘But when I would go to the rehearsal to hang out, I would sit and stare at it, this forest scene. It was as if I could imagine myself entering it… It was as if the music had made it open up, as if it were alive. This is only me probably, but I’d go wandering amongst the trees and the bushes along this path. It was always confused. Like, it wasn’t really happening, but I wasn’t imagining it either. It was like a portal, you know? Does this sound crazy? It was there to get inside.’

The notion of portals through which we can pass to explore the music of Memorial Device and the enigma of the band, and indeed to find out more about ourselves and our memories, is central to the stage production. In essence, we are taken on a quest of discovery – and we must commit to that quest.

This story also includes a description of the band’s music, which has made it into the show’s recorded score – a track that emerged from Stephen and Gavin jamming a response to the scene. Their music invites us to form our own impressions of the band, complementing rather than illustrating Anthea’s description:

‘Patty playing one chord on the guitar, Richard playing a mechanical rhythm on the drums, Remy alternating between these two notes on the bass… and Lucas would step up to sing and he was so handsome back then. His big lips,  big Bambi eyes, his long fringe… He’d step up to sing and his lyrics would be about one thing at a time – thinking something, then seeing something, then doing something. One thing would happen after the next, like an automatic voice playing out without any personal volition…’

Although Memorial Device remain the focus, I’m pleased to learn that the story of another Airdrie band, Chinese Moon, makes it into the show…

Chinese Moon are showroom dummies. Literally. The narrator of this story is Chinese Moon member David Kilpatrick, who tells the tale of how band member Duncan’s dad, who had a high street clothes shop, agreed to let the boys appropriate the store’s mannequins, dress them in their school uniforms, and place them in the shop window with tapes playing behind them – something in between an installation and a gig. So this becomes how the band always appear when they play – absent but present. Chinese Moon appear on stage in the production as, naturally enough, mannequins.

‘The mannequins are a great way of populating the stage,’ says Graham, ‘and there are all the associations of animation and resurrection that are relevant metaphors’. Another element he highlights is the choreography (by movement director Kally Lloyd-Jones), inspired by a story in the book that describes Lucas Black leading a dance workshop in the local library. The idea of what that might be is turned into an element of ritualistic performance; a recurring movement motif that weaves through the show.

‘We invent endings, really… There is no resolution. No fixed beginning, no neatly tied up end. People have tried to read into it so much, but it was just a moment – passing.’ – Ross Raymond  

So for an hour and a quarter we are taken on the quest with our narrator. From a theatrical point of view, it is a complete experience – but it isn’t one that answers all questions. There is room to think on.

‘People want art that can be solved, wrapped up, and thus abandoned – filed away in a folder marked “understood”. I’m much more interested in art that is an organic entity,’ says David.

He is confident that Memorial Device will continue to mutate into new incarnations. The book and the theatre show will live on, as will the spin-offs not authored by David Keenan – who in any case sees himself as ‘a vessel, a channel, not a puppet-master’. Having toured Scotland through Spring 2024, the show is at Riverside Studios for its London premiere from 23 April to 11 May 2024.

The album – another part of the story – is in the can, created by Stephen and Gavin and collaborators, with a gorgeous cover by former member and long-term Pastels collaborator Annabel Wright (aka Aggi).

So who knows what will emerge next. An installation, a site-responsive event, a painting exhibition, an exploration in contemporary dance, perhaps…

‘There’s that stupid expression – that writing about music is like dancing about architecture – but why not dance about architecture?’ he says. ‘You can definitely fucking dance about architecture’.

Why not indeed. 

This Is Memorial Device.

To be continued… whenever, wherever.

Featured image (top): This Is Memorial Device. Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Dorothy Max Prior spoke to David Keenan, Graham Eatough and Stephen McRobbie via Zoom, 2 April 2024.

This is Memorial Device, adapted and directed by Graham Eatough from the novel by David Keenan, was commissioned by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh: @lyceumedinburgh

It was developed with the support of the Stephen W Dunn Theatre Fund and originally produced in a co-production with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. 

Scottish Spring 2024 tour dates:

Tron Theatre, Glasgow – 27-30 March 2024

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh – 3-6 April

Lemon Tree, Aberdeen – 18-20 April

This Is Memorial Device comes to Riverside Studios for its London premiere from Tuesday 23 April – Saturday 11 May 2024

7.45pm (Wednesday and Saturday Matinees at 2.30pm, not 24 April) £30 (£20 concession)
www.riversidestudios.co.uk

Twitter/X: @riversidelondon | Instagram:@riversidestudioslondon

David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland. He is the author of six novels, including the cult classic This Is Memorial Device (Faber & Faber), which won the London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. He is also the author of England’s Hidden Reverse (Strange Attractor Press), a history of the UK’s post-punk/Industrial underground, as well as To Run Wild In It and Empty Aphrodite, (Rough Trade Books), two experimental novellas, and is the co-designer, alongside Sophy Hollington, of his own tarot deck, the Autonomic Tarot (Rough Trade Books). 

Twitter/X: @reversediorama

Graham Eatough is a theatre maker who also works in visual art and film. He is the writer/adapter and director of the stage show This Is Memorial Device. Other recent work includes co-writing and co-directing the book and film for the Floating Worlds project made with Dutch artist Andre Dekker on the Island of Mull in Scotland; an adaptation of Naoki Higashida’s book about autism, The Reason I Jump staged in a specially designed outdoor maze for National Theatre of Scotland; How To Act written and directed for National Theatre of Scotland; Nomanslanding a large scale floating public artwork to commemorate the First World War (Sydney Harbour, Ruhrtrienalle, Glasgow Tramway). He was artistic director of Suspect Culture theatre company from 1996 to 2009 creating over fifteen pieces of new work with the company, shown across the UK and internationally.

Stephen McRobbie (aka Stephen Pastel) co-founded The Pastels in Glasgow in 1981. They were a key act of the Scottish and British independent music scenes of the 1980s, and are specifically credited for the development of an independent and confident music scene in Glasgow. The group have had a number of members, but currently consists of Stephen McRobbie, Katrina Mitchell, Tom Crossley, John Hogarty, Alison Mitchell and Suse Bear.

The Pastels now operate their own Geographic Music label through Domino, and are partners in Glasgow’s Monorail Music shop.

Instagram: @pastelsthe

The album This Is Memorial Device by Stephen Pastel and Gavin Thomson will be released 28 June 2024.

Available from https://www.dominomusic.com/uk and https://monorailmusic.com/