Five Questions on Works From the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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. BATSHIT (February 4–7), created by Leah Shelton and directed by Olivier Award–winning Ursula Martinez, is a requiem for Leah’s grandmother Gwen, who was incarcerated for seeking independence in 1960s Australia. The London-based Blind Summit’s The Sex Lives of Puppets (February 18–21) is a vulnerable exploration of pleasure and desire.

We connected with some of each 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.

Leah Shelton (Creator of BATSHIT): BATSHIT is about the lies we’re told about female madness. It’s inspired by the story of my grandmother, Gwen, who was locked up and given a cocktail of drugs and shock treatment for wanting to leave her husband in 1960s Australia. It’s also an exploration stretching right back to the ancient myth of hysteria—the idea that your womb is going to wander around your body—to the current treatment of Britney Spears, the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial, and how some of these narratives around madness still exist. The work draws on my passion for theatricality: there’s lip-sync, fake limbs, dance, and some terrible stand-up comedy. But it also has a layer of very serious reflection and autobiographical storytelling.

Mark Down (Creative Director of Blind Summit Theater, The Sex Lives of Puppets): It’s obviously a rude subject, and I hope we deliver on being rude. But oddly, when you talk about sex, what you really end up talking about is love and relationships. So the show is really about the many ways that people navigate love, and how sex is at the center of that. It’s inclusive of all kinds of puppet sex, and it’s funny. But it’s also very moving, and sort of life affirming. I mean, there is some graphic puppet porn—but most of it is puppets talking about their sex lives.

Tell me about your background and company.

William Strom and Hugo Williams (Actors of 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.

Leah Shelton: A lot of my work is in the cabaret world—I did a year in Las Vegas as part of a variety show. But Polytoxic, the company I co-direct with Lisa Fa’alafi, is about creating change in the world. It often has a political underpinning, and we’re really passionate about equality and diversity, and interrogating the systems that we’re currently living with.

Mark Down: Originally I set up Blind Summit around 1997 with the puppet-maker Nick Barnes. Puppets were very unpopular back then, even more marginal than they are now. So we just had a mission to try and make theater with puppets. I’m still doing it 28 years later. We often work with casts—so several people on one puppet. The heads have a moving mouth, and are attached to simple bodies that are just made out of stuffing.

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.

Leah Shelton: I did a lot of research and uncovered medical records that had been in a dark dusty box somewhere. I went through an incredible process with my mum of accessing that information, and some of it was worse than I could have imagined: doctor’s notes saying, “Mrs. Cooper is still dithering about whether to leave her husband, so I think the full course of electric shock treatment is warranted.” I worked closely with my director, Ursula Martinez, who is quite an icon in the UK performance art scene, as well as with my sound designer, Kenneth Lyons, who has a massive brain catalog of cult musical references. Because this work was so personal, I brought my mum into the rehearsal room, and it turned into a really beautiful progression in our relationship.

Mark Down: Originally we had a show called Citizen Puppet, and the idea was to do a documentary or verbatim-style theater. It seemed like a really interesting thing to do—to make puppets talk about their backstory, or their offstage life, which of course doesn’t exist. Along the way, the cast messed around with the puppets, saying rude things, and then I came up with the title, The Sex Lives of Puppets. I got in touch with a professor at the London School of Hygiene, who turned out to be an author on the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. That became the basis for what we improvised and re-improvised in a puppetized way. Our designer on this show is Russell Dean, and we have a really interesting process where we’re matching heads to bodies, finding costumes, recasting, and we go back and forth until we get it right. The puppets have to look like they mean 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.

Leah Shelton: It’s an epic marketplace. It’s like The Hunger Games for artists… or maybe it’s more generous to say that it’s the Olympics for the arts. It’s a massive gathering, over 3,000 shows, and an incredible way for your work to be seen.

Mark Down: I just got back from my 25th Edinburgh, and it’s a super insane, insane event. It really wears you out—I mean, you’re physically exhausted, exhilarated, depressed. There’s all sorts of massive challenges, like you have just 15 minutes to set up your show and 15 minutes to take it down at the end. It’s so mad.

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.

Leah Shelton: A lot of people respond by feeling seen. The work is kind of personal, but it also opens up to become a homage to many women who have been disbelieved and pathologized. After one show in Edinburgh, a guy came up to me and said, “I’ve never thought about the word ‘hysterical’ before, and I realized I’m not going to call women that anymore.” We’re all conditioned to see the world in certain ways, but we can interrogate what those assumptions are.

Mark Down: Sex in entertainment is usually with very sexy people, but these are puppets, and puppets can’t be sexy. So they speak for us very ordinary people. My dad saw it and sat next to my brother and my brother’s 15-year-old boy, three generations. I think that was a little painful at times—he’s Catholic and pretty shy about talking about sex—but in the end he was really unembarrassed by it. I think that is a great thing.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe series generously sponsored by The Aufmuth Family.