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 seventh of a series of interviews highlighting artists and work within the Festival, as I chat with Fruit Bowl Theatre’s co-artistic directors, Arista Abbabatulla and Erin Walfisz, about their show, NiWho Gave You The Mic?
Who Gave You The Mic? is a Drag King Sketch Comedy starring Mike, Mike, Mike and… Mike. They sing, dance and battle their way through sketches, fighting for the position of the Alpha Mike. They attend funerals, go to after-school clubs, and even try dating apps, and yet there just doesn’t seem to be a place for the Mikes in the modern world. This is their chance to prove they’ve got what it takes; they were born to be the loudest voice in every room.
Come with us on a journey from hyper masculinity to fluidity, the more Mikes the merrier!
Where: Camden People’s Theatre.
When: 10 Mar, 9pm.
Ticket link: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/Who-Gave-You-The-Mic
Answers by Fruit Bowl Theatre Co-Artistic Directors –
Your sketch comedy Who Gave You The Mic? is showing at SPRINT as a work in progress. What can you tell us about it?
After creating the show for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024, we have been discussing wanting to redevelop it since, and Camden People’s Theatre SPRINT Festival was the perfect opportunity for us as emerging artists!
Who Gave You The Mic? is a drag king comedy about gender politics and toxic masculinity, featuring everyone’s favourite alpha male, Mike! The Mikes compete in a series of games to win The Mic and become The Ultimate Mike. And we then start to consider the consequences of the game in a movement-led segment. Essentially, we are using games, sketches and movement to explore gender politics in a lighthearted and comedic way!
This Work In Progress show is a completely revamped version of the Mikes, with a new cast, creative team and premise. This has given us the freedom to be more experimental this time round, also having grown in our individual creative practices since we last did the show.
How did Fruit Bowl Theatre start?
We started Fruit Bowl Theatre in 2023 after meeting through working on a devised jukebox musical called Losing The Plot with the University of Manchester Musical Theatre Society. It was born from a super collaborative process, and we loved that it sparked so much queer joy and celebration, so we decided to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe that summer! From there, we found that we all had a passion for queer comedy and started Fruit Bowl Theatre to collectively devise more interdisciplinary, intersectional queer comedies!
How did your collective develop this show, and how did you get into the drag king space?
So we started off knowing we wanted to do a queer, feminist comedy. Our first brainstorming session back in early 2024 had us cycle through various ideas for a sketch comedy. But we quickly realised that we wanted to create a piece that expressed the intense feminine rage we had all been feeling, realising that most of our frustrations were directed at a specific type of man.
The type who takes up all the space in the room, who believes he is entitled to be the loudest in every room, the alpha males who amplify misogyny and hate… and that’s how we landed on the Mikes!
Erin (co-director) was involved in the drag scene in Manchester, performing as a member of Drag Kings of Manchester. We felt like drag lends itself very well to sketch comedy, as it is inherently an exaggerated art form, and wanted our own drag personas of ‘Mike’ to satirise the worst of masculinity in a lighthearted way.
Arista (co-director) is interested in mixing non-traditional forms of theatre to look into intersectional feminism, and we thought it would be an interesting opportunity to mix Drag King personas with Feminist Theatre in a Sketch Comedy show.
Your show started at EdFringe in 2024. How has it evolved since then?
The show is one that really grows the more that we feed it. It feels fresh every time we revisit it. And that’s good, and necessary to keep the piece alive and politically relevant.
Since Edinburgh Fringe 2024, we have performed some sketches from the original show at a comedy night in Manchester and opened for Le Gasp Theatre at New Wimbledon Theatre. For this work-in-progress showing, we wanted to use it as an opportunity to tackle gender politics more head-on and try something completely new. Not many of the original sketches have made their way in, and we have completely changed the structure.
While the past version was structurally your bog-standard sketch comedy, this version at first takes on the form of a game show, where the Mikes must compete to prove their masculinity, and there are clearly structured patriarchal rules in place. This begins to fall apart, and we then bring the Mikes into a new world.
This playing with form has allowed us to approach gender politics more specifically, exposing structures, deconstructing them and looking for a healthy way to reconstruct. We have had a lot of conversations about gender throughout the process, hoping to develop our exploration of masculinity beyond stereotypes to hit real-world issues.
As co-artistic directors of Fruit Bowl, we were previously in the cast, but have now decided to take on the role of co-directors and to bring in some new actors, which would also explain why the show has changed so much!
What’s next for Fruit Bowl?
As recent graduates, we are all looking to further our creative practices. We want to continue building our links with the queer, feminist, comedic theatrical communities in London, and build a network of like-minded people with whom we can share art.
Fruit Bowl doesn’t currently have anything specific lined up, but we have members doing some very exciting things we would love to shout out:
Alexia Chrysostomu and Erin Walfisz are part of Degenerate Fox Theatre Company, performing and teching respectively, from April!
Abi Studley is performing at a scratch night with Cellar Door Theatre, where Erin Walfisz is directing one of the pieces.
Callaghan is performing a preview of a one-person show they will be taking to the Edinburgh Fringe this August- #Hysteria: A History of Human Sexuality with Callaghan’s Questions at The Divine on 16th March! [Read our 2025 interview with Callaghan].