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05 A FRINGE-TASTIC TIME Durham does the Edinbrugh Fringe Festival 2018

A Fringe-tastic Time

Durham Student Theatre took 7 shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2018! Here’s what some had to say about their time at Fringe.

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Alice and I co-directed ‘Crave’ by Sarah Kane this Edinburgh Fringe. The play is tricky to describe. Generally, though, it concerns love, loss, trauma, abusive relationships, paedophilia and mental illness. That being said, the play is about a lot more than just the sum of those themes. The four interlinking monologues reverberate and echo off each other, producing a highly rhythmical and emotional effect for the audience member. My favourite element of the play’s run in Edinburgh was watching the audience reaction to both the exceptionally talented actors and Sarah Kane’s words. All of the reviews highlighted Owen Sparkes’ outstanding monologue. It is this monologue which caused Alice and I to choose the play in the first place, so having people react to it so strongly proved satisfying and strangely cathartic. Overall, the Fringe was a great experience and a steep learning curve for everyone involved. Hopefully we’ll be back there next year! Marsistan is a short play I wrote last year for the Durham Drama Festival. It focusses on the relationship between two British-Pakistani sisters, Nasreen (Anusha Persson) and Aysha Malik (Layla Chowdhury). Their differences alone make their relationship tense, and this isn’t helped when Aysha is selected for a one-way mission to Mars. I’m extremely happy with how successful our run has been at the Fringe. Though our audiences have been on the small side, the play really seems to have sparked conversation between those who have come to see it. Critics have also been very complimentary of the script and performances which has been highly encouraging given that Marsistan is my first play. I’ve loved working with my assistant-director and producer, Anna Haines, who has been an invaluable member of our team. Layla and Anusha have been fabulous to work with and their performances have been authentic and heartfelt – so much so that some audience members have thought they were real sisters! I’m very excited to see where we can take Marsistan next! -Helena Snider KEITH. is Durham’s newest sketch troupe, created to expand the comedic opportunities available to Durham students. Their inaugural Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, KEITH. presents KEVIN., ran for two weeks as a free show, and we were thrilled to receive great critical and audience acclaim, including two four-star reviews from EdFringe Review, who praised the “silly, surreal and undeniably sharp” sketches, and called the performers “brilliantly ridiculous”. Mungo, Alex and George worked tirelessly to put the show together, and I am so glad that they received the full recognition they deserved. Aside from our show, for us the best part of the festival was the easily accessible comedy - spending time with funny people and appreciating their material is so important in bettering your own. You should always remember, though, that the Fringe works on word of mouth. A shared favourite show of ours, Electrolyte, was billed as a spoken-word/music piece. Without personal recommendations, we wouldn’t have gone, and would’ve missed one of the best shows of the Fringe. Trust the opinion -Andrew Cowburn

Having people react so strongly proved satisfying and strangely cathartic.

of your friends! -Hamza Adam Rafique 4

Inferno was a devised physical theatre piece based on Dante’s divine comedy focusing on the Inferno. Inferno calls into question classical ideas of morality and how they clash with out own moral values. Arriving in Edinburgh, the cast and crew got straight onto flyering on the mile in full costume. This was always an interesting time of day as we got a chance to meet other show runners, flyerers and also had a lot of pictures taken by passers by. One of the best things about the Fringe is the sheer amount of theatre that is available and everyone enjoyed seeing shows together and just taking in the atmosphere of the fringe. The top pieces of advice to consider when going to the Fringe would be to use Twitter and Instagram as much as you can, find a simple and engaging angle for your publicity that is consistent amongst all the cast and crew flyering, and in particular make use of the whole group you are with to flyer and cover as much ground as possible in Edinburgh. All in all Fringe is the most amazing experience and I would recommend anyone go even just to visit. -Henry Gould

Taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe is always hugely daunting, not least because we have never taken one before. However, we are very excited that ‘Yen’ went down successfully, although we haven’t quite recovered on our sleep yet! Now Yen really isn’t the easiest sell. However, when asked to explain what Yen was about, we had to give our much told spiel that ‘Yen is a story of nature and nurture, about two boys, 13 and 16 living in a flat, neglected…’ you see where we go. We were hugely lucky in that word of mouth picked up in a big way and for our last couple of weeks we were almost full. We were very excited to get the nicest audience responses over Twitter, and online and were often approached in the street by people who enjoyed the show. But being at Fringe definitely is not all about the show, because of the nature of ‘Yen’ and because of doing a full run, we had to focus on putting all our efforts into promotion. More than anything, we had an amazing time together, watched some amazing shows and had some of the funniest times. Fringe takes it all out of you, but if you don’t let yourself enjoy it, there is no point - Edinburgh is truly the best place in the entire world to be in August. -Hetty Hogdson

Fringe is the most amazing experience

This summer DULOG were transported to ‘Frottage 3’- the setting of the cult, glam-rock musical Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens. We had several performances on the Royal Mile over our run which, along with flyering in costume, was really great for publicity- even resulting in the Space Vixens (Millie Blair, Fizzy Raby and Sas Walsh) being interviewed for Scottish TV! The cast delivered performances with ‘buckets of enthusiasm’ (Broadway Baby), and we managed to get audience members to come on stage and dance at the end of the every show! Along with some great audience reviews, we were fortunate enough to be awarded 5 stars from the Derek Awards along with Elliot Mather, as Saucy Jack, being nominated for Best Individual Performance and Millie Blair, as Jubilee Climax, being nominated for Best Voice. We had a great sense of team-spirit in our cast and prod team and so, despite the lack of sleep, managed to get each other through our 19 performances and, overall, had a completely unforgettable time in Edinburgh! -Emilie Harlow

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