Five Questions on Works From the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with the Cast of Burnout Paradise

Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe takes place each August and draws daring, experimental, and genre-defying performances from around the world. A slice of that creative energy comes to Stanford Live this season, as three Fringe-acclaimed productions make their way to campus. Spanning theater and performance art, these works address social issues and difficult topics—including burnout, women’s mental health, and sexuality—with a healthy dose of artistic risk and bold humor.

Burnout Paradise (November 12–15), from the Australian experimental collective Pony Cam, pushes endurance to the breaking point as four performers run on treadmills and try to complete increasingly absurd tasks. 

We connected with some of the show’s creators to find out more.

What can the audience expect from your show? 

William Strom (Actor, Burnout Paradise by Pony Cam): You can expect a lively evening—it’s a very playful show with a lot of back-and-forth between us and the audience. It’ll get hot and sweaty because we’re doing a lot of running on our treadmills, and then there’s a lot of stuff we do while we’re running that needs assistance. So the audience can also, if they choose, be helping us out. People might be coming up on stage and handing me a toothbrush and toothpaste, or peeling some onions, or providing support for a grant application that we’re writing.

Tell me about your background and company.

William Strom and Hugo Williams (Actor, Burnout Paradise by Pony Cam): WS: Our backgrounds include dance, writing, and circus, but the work that we do as Pony Cam is experimental devised theater. HW: We’re a collective, which in-and-of-itself is a binding idea, because it means you resist the pull of hierarchy. So instead of having a director, or a writer, or even a leader, we co-author everything. Although we can’t function as efficiently as a hierarchy, there is a sense that we can arrive at more complicated questions and more complicated representations of life.

How did you develop your current show?

William Strom and Hugo Williams: WS: It took about three weeks. From a financial perspective, we just don’t have the money to pay ourselves for rehearsal periods, and from a making perspective, we prefer the energy of deadline pressure. We worked in a space that was once an e-scooter repair shop—carpets covered in oil, kind of a musty stench inside. HW: When we premiered the show, we’d only made fifty percent of it. By doing it in front of an audience, we completed it.

What’s it like at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?

Hugo Williams: For a very small period of time, everyone in town really cares about the arts. Like, really cares. You’ll be waiting for a coffee and someone behind you will ask, “Hey, what shows have you seen? What’s good?” There’s a sense that everyone’s out to see the best possible work they can, and that everything really matters.

What do you hope the audience will take away from your work?

Hugo Williams: We’re quite deliberately saying: “We do too much in too many different areas of our lives, and most of us are working to capacity.” And why is that? And how do you get out of that? Is it a psychological phenomenon? Is it a social phenomenon? Is it an economic phenomenon? What are the forces at play here? Is it an individual’s problem? Or is it is it a collective problem? Is it about care for each other, in a really simple way? And what sort of care are we talking about? These are questions that we ask in the work. I also hope audiences will take away an exhilaration that theater can be reckless, high energy, fiery, fist-flying excitement—that it can hold the unpredictable in a way that other events like music and sports do so well.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe series generously sponsored by The Aufmuth Family.