Gur Arie Piepskovitz, writer and director of Earworm, a play heading to Camden Fringe this month, tells us more about this anti rom-com.
Where: Camden People’s Theatre
When: 18-22 Aug
Ticket link: https://camdenfringe.com/events/earworm/
What can you tell us about your show and where did the idea come from?
Earworm follows Guy, an alternative cabaret artist searching for the perfect song to make sense of the breakdown of his relationship with John, a scholar of queer relationships.
As heartbreak unfolds, Guy’s soundtrack-obsessed mind turns pop songs into emotional lifelines, compulsions, and loops he cannot escape.
Through a disastrous dinner party, awkward hookups, and a relentless search for the perfect breakup anthem, Earworm explores the contradictions of modern intimacy: our craving for freedom and excitement alongside our need for stability, compromise, and connection as the play asks what happens when our desire for freedom collides with our need to belong.
Or as one reviewer described it as Abigail’s Party with a queer twist.
Honestly, the idea came after a breakup. My mind was everywhere: sadness, sex, spirituality, intermittent fasting, growing plants, and, most of all, music.
Instead of picking at the scabs of the relationship, I became obsessed with sounds and lyrics, trying to find the perfect song to explain what I was feeling. At one point, my flat was filled with yellow Post-its covered in fragments of thoughts, memories, and lines that I wasn’t yet capable of turning into a play.
As I started healing, I read Out of the Shadows by Walt Odets and became increasingly interested in the ways some queer people can fear intimacy while simultaneously craving it.
I realised my obsession with songs was just another way of creating a fantasy around a loss. That contradiction became the heart of Earworm.
How would you sell it to a potential audience in one sentence?
Earworm is an anti-rom-com about loneliness, commitment, and the songs we use to endure it all.
Why did you want to be part of Camden Fringe?
Camden Fringe sits in the sweet spot between the radical and the accessible, and Earworm offers exactly that. The show has now had three runs and, because it exists in the fringe world where money isn’t really at the heart of it, for better or worse, I’ve allowed myself to genuinely receive feedback after each run and ask what worked and what didn’t.
After the first run, with dramaturgy from Avihud Tidhar, we introduced some instrumental moments to deepen certain aspects of the relationships. After the second, I became much more interested in cleaning and distilling moments, so I’m fascinated by how the show has evolved every time we’ve put it in front of an audience.
I also have very fond memories of Camden People’s Theatre from working there years ago. Together with the Fringe community, it felt like the perfect opportunity to share how the piece has been chiselled and polished whilst keeping its edges.
It’s also been an opportunity to work with a beautiful cast who, at this point, feel more like comrades than collaborators.
What’s your favourite memory of Fringe theatre?
There are too many to choose from. If I had to single out one show, it would probably be Kim Noble’s You Are Not Alone. Its vulnerability, idiosyncrasy, and rawness were instrumental in shaping my artistic path.
Vic Llewellyn’s The Castle Builder, for the way it folded meta observations about creativity into something deeply human. Arriving in London and being in awe of The Yard’s vast, austere theatre, which to me felt both personal and epic at the same time.
Or Maya Thomas-Gilman’s one-woman show at the Hope Theatre, which felt so intimate and visceral that I could practically feel her veins running through mine.
As a theatre-maker, my favourite Fringe memories come from working in different venues across London and realising that the space itself, and the audience it attracts, become another actor in the piece, adding their own texture and perspective to the story.
What’s next for the show?
I’m a sucker for scripts, so one of my dreams is to see Earworm published.
The play began as a vase full of Post-its, fragments of thoughts, lyrics, and observations, so the idea of it eventually existing as something people can pick up and read in a solid form is meaningful.
I’d also love to tour the show around the country. I truly believe our little bittersweet play is both specific and universal: it can resonate with queer communities everywhere as well as with anyone who has lived through a breakup.