It’s August, and in Scotland, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is in full swing for artists, eccentrics, comedy buffs and theatre makers alike. In the festival’s 70th year, the emphasis is on making performances and audiences bigger and more subversive than ever. Crowds flock from around the world to perform, create and observe performance art of all genres and forms, and this year, those crowds include the troupe of Shabadoo and Improv, She Wrote, two home-grown acts from our very own college.
Shabadoo debuted with their first show, Eirwaves, in the DU Players Summer festival, Aurora, this year. The production was a live performance of a fictional radio show, written by Leo Hanna, Liam Farrell and Ken Donnelly, based in 1960s rural Ireland, and was broadcast live over Trinity FM. It featured vignettes of news, features, radio drama and that age old staple of Irish radio, mass. The show had audiences in fits of laughter, and as a result of its success, directors Hanna, Farrell and Donnelly decided to submit the production to be featured in Edinburgh.
I spoke with Hanna on the opportunities afforded from taking a theatre piece to such a reputable location. He explained that it was a “no-brainer” to take it to Edinburgh Fringe, as the show is “forty-five minutes of light-hearted and absurd comedy performed by some very funny and talented Irish actors”. I asked about the challenges of taking a show on tour to an international audience in this manner and Hanna spoke about this being a priority from the start of the production: “One of the main challenges is making sure the jokes translate well … The show deals a lot with parochial Ireland but from the beginning we wanted to make sure that the tone and punchlines could be appreciated by anyone.” I also questioned Hanna about preparing the same piece of work for a second time and if there were any differences when contrasted with the initial process. Hanna looked at it in a very positive light: “The first performances gave us a good idea of which bits worked and which didn’t.”
“As with any comedy it takes a lot of editing and rehearsing to perfect it. We are lucky that our cast are an extremely funny group of people who are constantly adding something new to the show every time they rehearse it”, he said. It’s certainly an incredible thing to see a brand new theatre company with one show under their belt already performing at such an internationally-acclaimed festival, and Shabadoo have big plans for the future, with two more shows already in the works.
Improv, She Wrote is a long-running improvisational group and has regular performances at events with DU Players. The shows utilise short-form and long-form improvisational games, including suggestions from the audience, demonstrating the depth of talent and sometimes, madness, the troupe possess.
One of the members of the group, Robbie Doyle, spoke to me about their plans for the Edinburgh Fringe. He described the show’s layout, with short-form games of five minutes taking up the first half of the show. One example of such a game is “Interrogation”. A member of the troupe leaves the performance space while the audience create a fictional crime that the absent member has committed. This member soon returns to the space and, while being interrogated for their crime, attempts to guess the nature of the crime they have committed.
The second half of the show is long-form improvisation, where scenes and sketches of a longer duration are based entirely on information supplied by an audience member. I wondered how the group went about preparing for such a piece, when the audience feedback would surely change at every performance. Doyle explained that “to prepare, we just practice the games with different suggestions. It’s very unlikely we’ll ever get the same suggestion twice, so we just have to make sure we know all of the ins and outs of the various games. Practicing long-form improv is also important, as it takes time to be comfortable with making up entire scenes based on simple statements”.
On their return from Edinburgh, I caught up with Doyle to find out how the show run went and he described it as an affirming experience: “In Trinity, it’s easy to assume that the audience are only laughing because they’re our friends, but it’s such a confidence boost to get a good reaction from a crowd of people you’ve never met in your life. Knowing that people enjoy the work we do encourages us so much to keep at it, and we certainly want to return to the Fringe next year.”
Improv, She Wrote was performed in Edinburgh from the 14th-20th August, in Black Market, and will be back with more shows in the coming year. Eirwaves is being performed in Edinburgh from the 21st-26th August in theSpace @ Jury’s Inn, near the centre of Edinburgh city.
