What is the best or most inspiring show you’ve seen at the Festival?
Whoah. Where to start? There are a few standouts over the years. I bloody loved some of the old school stuff I saw at Aurora Nova @ St. Stephens Church years ago… I was a teenager then… I can’t remember what shows, but those were the days! Only Bones was a banger, by some Finnish guy, a couple of years ago. The palindrome show by Onroerend Goed in 2019 was super inspiring too. Aussie circus never ceases to amaze me. Circa always deliver absolutely breathtaking shows. Humans 2.0.
Tell me a little more about your show and what audiences can expect.
I like animals. But 10 years ago, in drama training, my teacher said I was crap at doing animal studies. So I decided to make a show about it, doing as many animal impressions as I can in the space of an hour. The source of the animal names is a scientific red list of currently extinct and endangered species. Many of these names are poetic, comic, sad, absurd and stupid. So, I made a poignant and tragicomic show about a guy trying and failing to perform these names (as a metaphor for the current extinction crisis). In 2019, the Wild Thing! predecessor,Vigil, did really well at the Edinburgh Fringe and has toured internationally. Since the pandemic, the list on which it is based has doubled in size. I felt compelled to make a new show about this, exploring what extinction and biodiversity mean in a post-pandemic, Trump-fuelled world. Let’s see what happens…
Can you talk about some of the creative team involved?
There is a small team involved in making the show, but Wild Thing! is mainly built out of a tight collaboration between me (performer-director), and sound designer Xavier Velastin. Xavier is a brilliant sound artist and creative technologist who I’ve collaborated with over a few years now. We have a good rapport in creating work, so this has brought a way more playful audio world to the show, and interactivity between body and sound. It also allows us to sink deeper into questions around immersive technology in the show [such as] can technology play a role in helping us connect with disappearing species or vanishing nature (e.g. VR experiences), or is this a capitalist myth?
Where do you draw inspiration from for your work, both in terms of creation and performance?
I guess I was really inspired by place and landscape in the making of this show. There’s quite a lot of theatre industry interest in ‘green touring’ now. So I wanted to personally explore the question – can we be inspired to tour work by the way that nature moves and travels? It so happened that we picked up a tour date for this show in Scandinavia, so (in short) I ended up walking and sailing for 2 months through Scotland and Norway, exploring the theme of tree and forest migration. But it also turned into a kind of artistic pilgrimage, I guess, for extinction. I walked with a 16 metre-long sheet with the 48,000 species currently extinct/endangered printed on it, laying this out in the landscape at various points where I walked. I documented it. We wanted to find a way to make this journey fit within the fabric of the show, so it forms part of the show’s denouement – providing a theatrical space for expansion and reflection on the themes.
How do you feel about the current arts landscape in your country and your part in it? Does it excite you and inspire you to keep pushing the boat out?
It’s not great, but it’s not great in a lot of places. At least in England we actually have a public body we can apply to. But lots of countries don’t. However, it’s hard to get free from a background narrative/atmosphere of terminal decline here in the UK, since the 1980s/90s really – loss of public funding, loss of experimentation at the Fringe, neo-liberalisation of everything, cost of living etc etc. For me, getting free from subsidy-dependence is the impossible dream (for now), perhaps of lots of companies, as I think that Arts Council England’s ‘Lets Create’ strategy is as constricting for as many as it is liberating. I think what’s most pressing a concern for me is a seeming loss of political representation/political argument for the existence of arts beyond mere functionalist, economic terms.
What would you like audiences to take away from seeing this production at the Fringe?
Climate change can generally be a boring, apocalyptic or tragic subject for many people. There is quite a lot to be hopeless about, and those messages get looped around social media to create a lot of climate anxiety. The show doesn’t lie – there is no easy way out of this mess, and we’re no experts to propose a solution. The show provides a space for meditation on the scale of extinction, with compassion and acceptance, laughter and poignancy. It’s a tragic and absurd time that we’re living through. For me, laughter is a part of finding some sort of hope, imagination or way through this mess. When I explored at the IUCN Red List of extinct species, I was astonished at the number of comic species names there were – a Darth Vader Giant Pill Millipede, or a Problematic Flasher (a fish). Punning on some of these names – and the fact that I personally have no idea what these animals look like – became a gentle way into exploring a heavy topic. It starts funny, but goes into a tragic place.
We’re keen to take audiences to a heartspace that both looks at the sheer scale of extinction, and what species there are actually on the list. We make a mini epic out of a list of names. We want people to be moved by this, into a reflective and bittersweet state. In the words of author Donna Harraway, it’s about ‘staying with the trouble’ – and finding small points of hope through imagination, community and mindful awareness of the natural world on this planet.
Wild Thing!, Summerhall, 31 Jul-25 Aug (not 12, 19), 1.30pm