Two shows are coming to Edinburgh Fringe by Fragen Network this year. Read on for an interview with artistic director Roland Reynolds covering both Abhorrent Little Scrotum and Hunger.
Playing in the dark world of delusion and betrayal, Abhorrent Little Scrotum is a surreal, darkly comic cyber-thriller about fractured identity and broken friendship.
Where: Space 2 at theSpace on the Mile
When: 11-16 Aug
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/abhorrent-little-scrotum
This show is described as a ‘bold, high-energy dive into the subconscious, where computer hacking meets brain hacking’. Tell us more!
AI is advancing. The singularity is approaching.
We’re told to dream of a world where reality can be fully simulated in a perfect one-to-one match. But we love this world and theatre, like sport, is one of the great celebrations of reality.
So we wondered what it would be like if we tried to recreate the virtual world onstage, using only the immortal tools and techniques of the theatre – bodies, faces, voices, words, movement, light and shadow, music, energy.
All our plays are built around simple, universal and unanswerable questions that cause the play’s conflict and sustain its action in unexpected ways.
In this play, without giving too much away, a woman has been betrayed by those closest to her. She cannot understand why and has dissociated her mind from the wound left behind.
Now she wanders under ‘the Experience’ something between a psychedelic drug and a videogame, an online space of dream and hallucination, asking herself why people do the things they do.
Abhorrent Little Scrotum is about an out-of-work hacker called Jack who is trying to break into the most complex computer of them all, the human brain. Her friend’s brain.
She wants to hack into it because her friend is hurting and she believes she can make her feel better.
The play wrestles with the question of whether we have the right to heal a friend by force, even if we see them suffering, drifting, lost and upset and not sure what to do.
Whether our idea of their health and wholeness matches with their own.
This physical piece looks set to delight and challenge audiences. What should they expect?
When we talk about making theatre that is physical and challenging to audiences, we mean that we want to channel the same energy that audiences find in sport.
The addictive beauty of sport is not to see peak athletes showing off under perfect conditions but to watch athletes in conflict as teams or individuals fight on the very edge of exhaustion and intensity to deliver their skills under pressure.
Sport is a deep inner metaphor for survival. It’s a simulation of the life-and-death scenarios we no longer face in our sanitised world.
We believe theatre must embrace those life-and-death stakes too. Story contributes to the overall work but it’s only a part of the picture. Story, like the game, is a set of rules.
Whether you watch a game of football or you watch Hamlet, you know what to expect. Yet every game of football is different, the stakes are unpredictable. A performance of Hamlet should be no different.
So the question becomes how to articulate stakes outside the story. The story is the vehicle for these stakes, for the magical synthesis of competition and collaboration that makes live performance unique.
We know that by the end of the show, spoiler alert, Hamlet will die. But we don’t know how we will get there, and what it will cost the actors to take us there.
If the actors are at the very edge, if the intensity of truth, of silence, of connection is there, then theatre is an immersive experience like no other.
You don’t need to interact with an audience in order to immerse them. When their football team wins a match, the fans feel as though they won themselves, though they never touched the ball.
Theatre is the same. You don’t need projections or technology, you don’t need to bring them onstage. You need to stimulate their imaginations.
Remember that Shakespeare’s stage is empty, because theatre exists in the mind. The tools of an actor are body, face, voice, words, acting alone or in ensemble.
These tools have been the same since theatre began, since humanity began, since we started telling stories around the campfire.
This is what we try to reach back to at Fragen. We try to strip away the complex business of theatre and get back to the absolute basics but done with commitment, with style, with energy taken to the very edge.
Adapting one of the earliest stream-of-consciousness novels for the stage, Hunger is the portrait of a starving writer in an unforgiving city.
Our nameless protagonist swings from ridiculous delusions of grandeur to fits of existential despair as he battles against his own self-sabotage and a world that cannot understand his gifts.
Fragen Network utilize our signature blend of dream worlds, physical theatre and dark humour to create a raw, hypnotic exploration of desperation, obsession and the fragile line between genius and madness.
Where: Space 2 at theSpace on the Mile
When: 18-23 Aug
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/hunger
Knut Hamsun’s novel is the inspiration for this ‘bold and hilarious new adaptation’. What appealed about the book?
I remember reading the book with my mouth open, just astonished at every page. I was living in a rather dark and dingy flat at the time, struggling to write my own work the miserable February of 2024, and reading Hunger felt like looking into the most exposing mirror. With unfailing wit and irony, Hamsun creates a protagonist who is the epitome of deluded grandeur, an unrecognised genius railing against a world that refuses to accept him and to which he cannot bend. He’s cruel, egotistical, manipulative, arrogant, ridiculous, transparent. He reminded me of me, and it made me laugh. I have never cast myself in one of my own shows before.I am not an actor, though I performed a lot in the past. Reading this book, I knew that if I didn’t cast myself in this role, it would be cowardly. He looks like me, he sounds like me, in all the worst ways, and I thought it would be a hilarious opportunity to explore my own worst impulses through the eyes of this sensitive, shameless man.
We look for very specific energy whenever we consider established works for adaptation. All productions works revolve around a single theme: the conflict with self-deception. Our characters are lost in some kind of lie and they are tormented face-to-face by this lie through the dramatic conflict. Reading Hunger, we were astonished by the grand delusion of this central character. He really thinks he’s the greatest, most significant artist, and even perhaps the only three-dimensional person in the world, while his life is a total train wreck. This contradiction makes us laugh, because we see that same contradiction in ourselves.
Every artist is deluded and this delusion is necessary to keep you going through the hard times. He lives a life of dire poverty, as many artists do. On the one hand, this poverty is a choice, since he is so well-educated that he could do anything, he could hold down any job and do quite well for himself. So he is separated by this privilege of opportunity from the real suffering souls who struggle every day to make ends meet. And yet at the same time, it’s not a choice because he doesn’t have the mentality to hold down a normal job, to be an orderly, well-mannered member of society. He is unwell. He self-sabotages. He can’t find a way to surrender to what his culture expects of him. He’s at the fringes. This has been our own experience, and so while we laugh at this man’s pomposity, we also deeply feel his inner struggle.
We were touched by the world this man inhabits. Hamsun performs a perfect, deceptive balancing act here when he portrays a character selfish to the point of refusing to even acknowledge the rounded humanity of the people around him. Yet it is by looking only through this self-obsessed lens, with cutting irony, that Hamsun reveals what a fool this man is to be so solipsistic. We only get glimpses of how he appears to other people, but those glimpses are enough to remind us of how foolish we ourselves appear to other people. That was a central attraction.
This show is classed as experimental and immersive. What might audiences expect?
Hunger is the classic stream-of-consciousness novel. More than just a story, it portrays a mind in chaos. The author Hamsun uses novelistic techniques to portray this chaotic mind and it was so thrilling to read that we wondered what uniquely theatrical techniques we could use to portray the same mind but onstage.
Every production aspires to being “different every night” but in this show, we really mean it. That’s what will be experimental and immersive about it. We intend to write the show every evening, so that no two performances will be identical. This is our theatrical solution to the fragmentary nature of the novel.
The protagonist separates himself off from the rest of humanity. He raises himself up above everybody else, a great genius just waiting to be revealed, the caterpillar in the chrysalis. And as he wanders the streets, his disordered mind struggles to put this jumble of sensations and experience into some semblance of order. He tries to make sense out of the chaos of the world, not knowing that the chaos is in his own brain. This is what we want to try to achieve every night on the stage. We break the novel up into units of drama based around themes, recurring characters, events, even the stages of his hunger, and then he will organise these beats to create a different show each evening.
He might have to reach into the audience for some help with this, or ask the other actors. He might have to consult his notes or the book itself. He might have to dredge it up from memory. He might struggle to get out of bed in the morning. He might forget everything. The whole show is a risk.
This is the ambition, then, to do a show that is completely different every single night because it deals with different scenes, different characters, different events and conflicts, but all framed around this chaotic mind.
This is why I want to perform it myself, because I also have a writer’s mind. It will be an exposing process and I have to expose myself to it. I know I’m not a transformative actor but that I can perform, that I can stand in front of an audience and convey meaning through my mind, body, face and voice. My aim is to channel that spirit of Hamsun’s lead character in order to give the audience more than just a rendition of the story of the novel. I want them to taste how it felt when I read it that very first time.
So, that’s the two shows covered!
How did you start in theatre? Do you find Fringe festivals inspiring?
It started out trying to be funny. Almost every performer knows that moment. You’re five years old and all eyes are on you, maybe in a school play or around the dinner table; everyone is clutching their belly and rolling around, and it’s all because of you. That’s how it started with me.
My parents used to play the Goon Show as I fell sleep. I started imitating the voices. People laughed at it and I was hooked. As I got older and my understanding of performance grew more sophisticated, I realised that there was a whole universe behind the stage. The only thing more attractive than embodying one character was to come up with a whole world of characters, to put them under the lights and watch it all come to life.
One dark winter day in 2007 Richard Demarco, the great legend of Scottish arts, the Traverse Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe, turned up at my school. He was looking for a student to take a project to the Fringe and he heard about me on the grapevine. He accepted my proposal to write and direct a play called Stalemate, about a Catholic priest who impregnates one of his parishioners, and he produced it at the Roxy Arts Theatre Complex in 2008.
I was 16. We were on at quarter to midnight, eight performances, about ten people in the audience per night. It was the toughest week of my life but it felt like just the right thing. I was home. Ever since then, it’s been my life. I studied at Drama Centre London where I developed the core concepts behind Fragen theatre, and then set up the Fragen Network in order to produce performance in the UK and internationally.
We love working on the fringe. To us, the fringe is a destination in itself and not a stepping stone towards famous venues, bigger stages, larger budgets. We love theatre that is small, intimate, physical and raw. That’s hard to find in a thousand-seat venue. When the actors are close enough to smell them, the level of immersion is that much more potent. It’s a completely different form to the grand spectacle offered by other beautiful arts like the ballet or opera. The kinds of atmospheres, experiences, insights, mysteries and revelations you can discover in fringe theatre are like nothing else.
Obviously, working on the fringe is a struggle because you are always fighting against the mainstream. Making work in the counter culture, it will always be tough to reach audiences with your approach, since you compete against established industrial giants selling more commercialised products. But that’s exactly why the fringe is the most inspiring place to make work. It’s where the very best, most alive work is happening.
We understand that seeing work on the fringe is risky for audiences because the variability is greater, the quality doesn’t seem so guaranteed. But that’s why theatre should be cheap and accessible. People should be going to the theatre all the time, seeing all kinds of things, because this is the living culture. The real people of our time appear in front of us day in, day out.
You only have to look at how Hollywood is trying to resurrect Carrie Fisher or Peter Cushing to understand that culture is under threat. The money men believe the future is in the past. Theatre is going the same way. This is a travesty. The fringe is swiftly becoming the only place you can see your own time portrayed in culture, live and not on social media. So fringe festivals are definitely inspiring to us, absolutely.
What are you looking forward to the most in Edinburgh?
We’ve done the Edinburgh Fringe four times since 2008 and we absolutely love it. One of the best things about it is the camaraderie and competition among the artists, the mad mix of performers and entertainers, producers and venues fighting day and night to show their best. But the thing we always look forward to the most is the audience. They’re right there, pounding the pavement all day, just hoping to be captured. They hold out their arms and beg to be flyered, to be marketed at, to be pulled into an experience they never dreamed of.
The whole city becomes one big window-shopping experience of live performance, it’s like nowhere else on earth. Ad how terrifying, too, because the competition is so high. You have to believe your show is worth the risk of their time and you have to convey this to them in seven and a half seconds. The pressure is on twenty-four hours a day and we relish it. It’s surely the only festival where marketing is as exhilarating as the performance itself.
What’s next for this show?
We are in some discussions to transfer the plays to London after Edinburgh, either late this year or early next. We’ll present together as a double bill every evening, so that the audience can see these two contrasting but complementary works side by side.
After that, we intend to take them internationally. We’ve made some contact with spaces in Shanghai, Tokyo and eastern Europe. We’ve always wanted to do the Prague Fringe. Other than that, we are open to offers!