The day that cult clown duo Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland arrived at the idea for their new Fringe show, right-wing American commentator Charlie Kirk was shot. The two events are unrelated, insofar as the pair knew nothing about the assassination until it flashed up on their phones, but have in the intervening months become strangely entangled. Rice had just finished watching a documentary on Bigfoot sightings in the US when Roland arrived to nail down the pitch for their upcoming Fringe commission, the duo’s first new show in two years. Moments later, the news broke. The three seemingly disparate threads of the evening – Bigfoot, Charlie Kirk and the Fringe – suddenly coalesced as social media began churning out conspiracies, theories and dire accusations before Kirk had even been pronounced dead. “The right saying it was the left, the left saying it was the right, the centre saying it was the off-centre, people going, ‘this is a distraction, the Epstein files must be really bad’…I was like, oh my god, it has not been 15 minutes,” Rice says. “The whole thing was really inspiring in how flooding people with information is a really good way of distracting them and keeping them fighting with each other,” Roland adds.
It is a wild origin story for a play, but one that makes perfect sense for Rice and Roland. Ever since arriving on the Fringe landscape with their hit show And Then the Rodeo Burned Down in 2022, the duo have become known for their sharp, absurdist blend of pop culture and political theatre, in which Dolly Parton songs sit alongside metatheatrical critiques of arts funding, and 1950s cannibalistic housewives speak to a post-Roe-v-Wade landscape. Every one of their shows – 2022’s Rodeo, 2023’s What If They Ate the Baby? and 2024’s A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First – won a Fringe First, a run unheard of for two independent, unproduced theatremakers. This year’s show, Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It, has a similar fascination with the American political context, this time accompanied by cryptozoologist mythos and a nine-foot tall Bigfoot puppet. “Well, ‘nine-foot,’” Roland laughs. “It might be a little bit shorter than its Hinge profile.”
Employing such an enormous prop – and adding a third figure to the stage for the first time in the duo’s history – is an evolution in their theatrical technique that nevertheless speaks to the pair’s preoccupation with physical theatre and the marriage between form and function. “We were thinking about themes of coercive control and misdirection, and things that draw your eye; like ‘look over there,’ so that you don’t look over here in both a literal and political sense,” Rice explains. “What’s fascinating about puppetry, when you think of Julie Taymor’s double event of showing the puppeteer and the puppet, is it prove[s] that even with a very Brechtian exposing of mechanics, humans can still suspend their disbelief. We’re reminding you it’s a puppet the whole time, yet when the lights are on and we’re holding this fucking nine-foot guy and he’s moving, your brain tricks you into creating a story.”
In this way, Rice and Roland’s nine-foot sasquatch puppet is the Charlie Kirk of the play – a shiny object that embodies the ways in which distraction and misinformation have become primary tools within the American political and cultural landscape. The pair are animated listing different conspiracies that draw a veil over reality, including a theory that the film Frozen was made specifically to cover up allegations that Disney cryogenically preserved their founder’s head. “The perfect way to hide something is to drown it out,” they say eagerly. “Like the hundreds of pages of Elsa and Anna fan art that are hiding Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen head.”
Bigfoot is the first of Rice and Roland’s shows not to premiere at SpaceUK; instead, it is showing at Summerhall, where the marker of many a successful Fringe show has been an acclaimed television adaptation. Yet in its emphasis on liveness and physical theatre, Bigfoot acts as a wry commentary on the very machine of the Fringe, and the shifting parameters of success within performance arts. “The ‘I Saw It’ in the title – we’re playing on the concept of when something is live and can’t be rewound or replayed,” Rice explains. “Like how easily can you trust what you saw with your own eyes, especially if you’re on your ninth Fringe show of the day.”
With three Fringe Firsts and multiple sold-out runs (the pair brought all of their back catalogue last year, sometimes performing three packed-out shows a day), it would be easy for Rice and Roland to rest briefly on their laurels, or to become obsessed with gaining even more. Yet while they are always aware of how these parameters of success affect their ability to make art, their choice to keep their eyes on the prize of creative experimentation, puppets and all, rather than awards and reviews is, for them, the best indication of success they can imagine.
“I don’t even know if I want to say this,” Rice pauses briefly, “I’ll say it! I think it is objectively true that eventually Natasha and I are going to write a show and it’s not going to win a Fringe First. And no matter how good that show is on paper, people will see it as less than because we’ve set a weird standard for what a Fringe is for ourselves. But there’s so many other metrics of success: having audiences see the show, or even just having a good time.” Do they think not winning a Fringe First might end up feeling liberating? “Listen,” Roland laughs. “Yes. I think when we get over our fear of failure – like failure in broad strokes – we will soar. We’re also reminding ourselves that this is the Fringe and the Fringe is for artists trying new things.”
“Allegedly!” Rice interrupts, laughing. “Allegedly!” Roland laughs too. “That’s what it’s supposed to be. And so to bring a new work, as scary as that is…we are at a point now where we just want to love it ourselves.”
Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It, Summerhall, 6-30 Aug (not 18, 25), 9.10pm