In classic fashion, we’ve started with weather chat. “We’re going to have a rubbish Edinburgh,” groans Thanyia Moore. We’re meeting to discuss her new show, August, during an unnerving run of back-to-back sunshine; which, we agree, can only mean we’ll pay for it down the line.
But Moore is no stranger to difficult experiences at the festival. The comedian’s latest hour concerns her particularly traumatic Fringe debut in 2022, when she had a miscarriage on day one of her previews. Five days later, doctors discovered she had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. Moore returned to London for medical treatment but ultimately came back to finish her run. “I don’t think I had accepted what had just happened to me,” she says, “and Edinburgh’s a good place to forget about everything.” Despite her team’s wholehearted support, she felt guilt over the wasted expense, and internalised stigma around her “female issue” letting them down, so she initially lied about what had happened: “I told them that I pulled a muscle in my groin and I just started limping!”
Even amid crisis, Moore recognised the creative potential. “When I was in the hospital, before I even knew it was a miscarriage, I was like, ‘I’m going to make this a show,’” she says. Partly she was driven by a desire for answers: “Whenever something bad happens to me, I’m obsessed with trying to find the reason and how I can learn from it.” But equally, she felt the need to do something productive with her grief. Moore’s unsure whether she’s fully processed the events of 2022 yet, but returning to them has, at the very least, reinforced her confidence in her creative powers. “I can say, ‘look, it was a traumatic experience but look at what I’ve made from it. We’re going to touch people who are grieving and hopefully make them understand that there’s no one way to grieve.” On this point, she gets very animated: “Babes, if you want to grieve and do a skydive, you skydive the shit out of yourself, okay? And if you want to grieve and sit in a tree, you sit in the biggest fucking tree that you need to sit in.”
No matter the forecast, Moore still promises light and levity. “I think one of the beautiful things about being a comedian is you can take sad moments and find the joy in them. What I love about my show is that, yeah, we touch on some deep moments, but I think the audience should trust that I can bring you out of those. And by the end of it, we’ll be laughing. Maybe crying a little bit, but we’ll be laughing mostly.”
So, after everything that’s happened, how does it feel to be returning to the Fringe this year? “I had zero desire to go back,” Moore deadpans; however, her aspiration is to turn her story into a film, and the best way to do that is to have a presence at the biggest arts festival in the world. Now her feelings about returning have changed somewhat – for all its universal themes, August is also a uniquely Edinburgh story. “I think there’ll be something special about what I’m talking about, where I was at the time and what was going on. And everyone in the room will probably have just walked down that road or went to that coffee shop.”
But also, she’s looking forward to closure for herself. “I’m looking forward to going back to certain places that I went to, to hide from the Fringe,” Moore says. “I want to be like, last time we were here was different. Now we can wrap that up with a nice little bow and say, that’s done now.”
Thanyia Moore: August, Pleasance Courtyard, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 11), 5.40pm