Camden People’s Theatre’s SPRINT Festival returns with a packed programme throughout March. London’s “best-established carnival of new and unusual theatre” features artists with bold ideas, artists who don’t play by the rules, and artists, in many instances, making their first professional work.
This is the third of a series of interviews highlighting artists and work within the Festival, as I chat with Sam Holland-Bunyan (co-writer and director) about Untethered’s show, Am I Losing My Mind or Just My Figure?
Inventive, physical and achingly human, the play captures the millennial female zeitgeist. Comically exploring life, pregnancy & parenthood, it’s a “must-see for anyone navigating the complexities of modern womanhood.”
Fin, a freelance illustrator, is working a zero-hour contract as a cycle courier, her free-spirited and unconventional approach to life at odds with the expectations of those around her. Her discovery in her late twenties that she is pregnant leads her to confront her own belief systems and examines the othering of expectant mothers.
Where: Camden People’s Theatre, Main House.
When: 6 Mar, 7.15pm.
Ticket link: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/Am-I-Losing-My-Mind-Or-Just-My-Figure
Your show Am I Losing My Mind or Just My Figure? is showing at SPRINT next week. What can you tell us about it?
The play follows Fin, a freelance illustrator working a zero-hour contract as a cycle courier, whose free-spirited and unconventional approach to life is often at odds with the expectations of those around her. Her discovery in her late twenties that she is pregnant leads her to confront her own belief systems and examine the othering of expectant mothers.
The show captures the millennial zeitgeist, enables conversations around societal pressures on women to have children and explores complications around pregnancy. It features great music, animated film, is funny and thought-provoking and holds space for debate about the modern female experience.
How did Untethered get started?
Genevieve Labuschagne [co-writer and performer] and I met by chance when we were both on separate MAs (Gen in acting at RADA’s Theatre Lab and me in theatre directing at Birkbeck) and realised we had vaguely connected over two decades previously through family and friends when we were both living in Sussex.
Serendipitously, we started talking about our work as theatre makers and recognised we were kindred spirits with a similar approach to theatre making that placed the actor at the centre of the work and used an improvisational devised form to develop text. Once we had made the decision to make Am I Losing My Mind Or Just My Figure?
It made sense to start with it as the first piece we made for Untethered, aligning with our want to form a theatre company whose work explored problematic themes with good humour, physicality and complicité.
How did you develop this show, and what should audiences expect from it?
It has been almost twenty-five years since I wrote and performed the first version of the play at the Pleasance as part of the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe. Gen and I worked together on redeveloping the script and show last year to create a contemporary version that considers some of the crises that Gen has experienced as a woman in her late twenties attempting to manage the pressures of an unconventional career, misguided relationships, and the decision to have a child.
The show doesn’t shout to be heard; instead, it generously lets an audience in with the resulting connection for many audience members being subtly profound. As a reviewer from our 2025 Camden Fringe run wrote, “It holds space for what matters—the everyday, the overlooked, the quietly heavy things that shape us all”.
How has your show evolved since it was first planned?
As artists, Gen and I have become close collaborators and share a generosity and fearlessness in the way in which we make work. It has been rewarding to see how the show has been received twenty-five years after its first incarnation and its ability to gently and effectively probe societal attitudes to pregnancy, intergenerational misunderstanding, relationships and faith.
At least half of the script is entirely new, but the central storyline and themes remain pretty much unchanged, with many of the same issues facing a twenty-nine-year-old in 2026 every bit as much as in 2001.
The 2026 production uses animated film, where the original used large sheets of paper and an overhead projector, but we still use the same gym stool that we used in the first production as a key part of the set.
The show’s additional visibility through award nominations and positive reviews has expanded its reach to wider audiences and other creatives who have come on board since to support the project, particularly from a production perspective, as we head to Edinburgh.
What’s next for you?
Am I Losing My Mind Or Just My Figure? is going to be at The Bridge House Theatre, London, in May, before a run at the Edinburgh Festival in August, and we are talking to studio theatre spaces across the South West who are interested in it for their Autumn/Winter programmes.
A short film based on the show has commenced filming and is due to be completed in late Spring with cinematographer Joseph Kennedy. Meanwhile, Gen and I are developing a new play for Untethered around themes of gambling and addiction for 2026/27, and I have some freelance work as a director in the North West and Scotland later this year, alongside developing new writing projects in the South West with Hinterland Theatre.
You can follow Sam at @samhollandbunyan_directing/