"The play is essentially about freedom. Freedom as a country. Freedom as a woman."
Poet and playwright Imogen Stirling on her new two-hander Starving, her five-star show Love The Sinner, and more. Plus: three shows to see next week.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre written by Fergus Morgan.
This is the free, Friday issue, which usually contains a Q&A with an exciting theatremaker or an essay on an theatre-related topic - this week, there is an interview with Scottish poet and playwright Imogen Stirling, whose new play Starving opens in Glasgow next week and who will be touring her acclaimed show Love The Sinner around Scotland later this year. After that, there are your usual three show recommendations: two in London and one in Bristol.
In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue of Shouts And Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most interesting reviews, interviews and other articles on theatre elsewhere…
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Born in 1992, Imogen Stirling grew up in North Berwick, a small town on the East Lothian coast. She loved writing, participated in youth drama groups, and studied theatre at the University of Glasgow, but never felt she had found her thing until – after a few years busking around Europe – she discovered performance poetry.
Inspired by Kae Tempest, Luke Wright and more, Stirling started gigging in 2018 and – Covid aside – has not stopped. She has appeared at Latitude Festival, The Secret Garden Party, the Edinburgh Fringe and elsewhere; featured alongside the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah on Sky Arts’ show Life & Rhymes; and staged two acclaimed shows straddling theatre, performance poetry and live music – #Hypocrisy and Love The Sinner – both of which have been published, too. Alongside that, she has worked in development roles for publisher 404 Ink, the Tron Theatre, and Summerhall.
Stirling will be touring Love The Sinner, created in 2023 with theatre company Vanishing Point, around Scotland later this year. Before that, she is making her debut at Glasgow’s long-running lunchtime drama series A Play, A Pie and A Pint with Starving. Directed by Eve Nicol and starring Isabella Jarrett and Madeline Grieve, it runs at Oran Mor next week before transferring to Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre.
Your new play for A Play, A Pie and A Pint is about the Scottish artist and activist Wendy Wood. Why did you want to write about her?
Wendy Wood lived from 1892 to 1981 and she was many things, but she is best known for being an activist for Scottish independence. She helped found the National Party of Scotland, which became the Scottish National Party, but was chucked out of it. She was very into theatrical activism and performance art, and she even presented Jackanory.
I chanced upon her when I was researching another project and her life seemed so technicolour that I had to write about her. We are always celebrating tormented, flawed men in the media, whereas women, if they are remembered at all, have to be sensational and pure and wonderful. I wanted to celebrate the story of a woman that absolutely was not those things. Wendy Wood really divided opinion.
How have you put Wood’s story on stage? Is it a play? Is it poetry? Is it both?
Instead of telling her story in straightforward, biopic style, we have interpreted it as a two-hander with two clashing timelines. One is in 1972, when Wendy did a hunger strike for home rule, i.e. Scottish independence. The other follows an anxious, modern woman who now lives in the Edinburgh flat that Wendy did her hunger strike in. These timelines merge and the two of them find themselves sharing the space over one evening.
The play is essentially about freedom. Freedom as a country. Freedom as a woman. Freedom as an individual. Some drafts have been very poetic. Some have not. The one we have arrived at holds a little bit of both. There is a little bit of a gig vibe to it. It’s very stripped back and there are mics and flight cases chucked in, too. And it is so exciting to be doing it at A Play, A Pie and A Pint, which has become such a cult institution.
You first released Love The Sinner as a poetry collection in 2021, then made it into a show with Vanishing Point last spring. It anthropomorphises the seven sins as people living in modern-day Glasgow. Where did that idea originate?
I just love the seven sins, to be honest. I find them really fascinating as a concept. Often, I think there is an absence of character in poetry that frustrates me. I suppose it felt like a challenge to imagine the seven sins as seven people who are quite gross, and then find the beauty and empathy in these really ugly characters.
Lust is this young guy who has a very violent, difficult perception of love and sex and intimacy. Wrath is a woman who feels she has to tiptoe through life and dilute her own anger. I had people in mind to an extent. There is a lot of inspiration in Glasgow. The spectrum of people you meet here is absolutely nuts.
It is a very cool show with music from Sarah Carton and Sonia Killman, a set from Alisa Kalyanova and lighting from Simon Wilkinson. The photos look incredible.
It is cool. It is a really sexy show. I love the whole design of it. The set is quite tall, though, and the show is quite tech-heavy. We got some Creative Scotland funding for the first edition and decided to create the ultimate version of the show and worry about the problems of touring it later. Later is now and it is definitely a challenge to figure out.
How did you get into poetry and performance and theatre in the first place?
I’ve always loved words. I read a lot when I was young. I was a big musical theatre kid, too. I did all the youth theatre stuff at the Lyceum and the Playhouse in Edinburgh. I could never quite find my thing, though. I was very into music but didn’t write music. I liked theatre, but I didn’t want to be an actor. I ended up going to Glasgow University and doing theatre studies, which was illuminating in some ways but very limiting in others.
I left a bit disenchanted and directionless. For a few years, I was in a music duo called Wonderful Exile. We travelled extensively around Europe for a while, gigging in an ad hoc, spontaneous way. When I came back to Glasgow, I discovered the work of artists like Kae Tempest and Shane Koyczan and fell in love with it. It wasn’t theatre. It wasn’t music. It wasn’t the poetry I had been introduced to at school. It was explosive and performative and direct. I signed up for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018 and gave it a shot.
What appealed to you about that style of work?
I love poetry but I hate the places that it is often pushed towards. They are so boring and quiet when poetry is so vibrant and loud. You only have to look at artists like Self Esteem and Arlo Parks, or at the popularity of rap and hip-hop and grime to see that the line between poetry and music and performance is so fine. Poetry should occupy the same spaces. You have to be careful about calling it poetry, though. Poetry is a difficult word. Theatres are often keen to avoid using it in marketing because it puts people off.
How hard has it been to build a career doing this in Scotland?
There have been ups and downs. I have always been freelance, apart from the couple of years I spent working as artist development coordinator at the Tron Theatre. I have always done a lot of side stuff like workshops and education. Poetry has got trendy so people are always wanting poets to come into schools and stuff.
Outside of Covid, when I decided to train as a barber for a while, I have always gigged a lot, so that has been a consistent source of income that a lot of theatre artists don’t have. I do prefer being freelance as a way of life, but the peaks and troughs are horrible.
What does life look like for you now?
I left the Tron Theatre last year, and at some point I will be the development and producing lead at Summerhall Arts, when that post materialises. I’m working with The Lowry, too, as part of an advisory group they have just established. I’m really trying to keep that artist development side of my work going. I am working as associate dramaturg at a musical theatre residency at Cove Park soon, too.
And I am just trying to get other stuff off the ground. There is Starving and Love The Sinner. I am doing another project with Raw Material that is somewhere between poetry and theatre and music. I’m developing a show with the musician Susan Bear involving poetry and drum-and-bass, which is very loosely inspired by the myth of Persephone and is all about sexual autonomy and women’s bodies and contraception. We want to take it to music festivals rather than theatres, as I love performing at music festivals. I like the challenge of making text-heavy work fit into that environment.
Starving is running at Oran Mor in Glasgow from March 4-9, then the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh from March 12-16. Love The Sinner will tour Scotland this Autumn.
Three shows to see next week
Oedipus Electronica - Brixton House, until March 9
Pecho Mama is a band-cum-theatre company that burst onto the scene in 2016 with Medea Electronica, a contemporary, musical interpretation of Euripides’ tragedy. This follow-up does the same thing with Sophocles, recasting the story of Oedipus in a modern world of drug-dealers and dance music, with a compelling meta-theatrical twist. I saw it at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022 and loved it. You can read my four-star review here and get tickets for its short South London run via the button below.
Out Of Season - Hampstead Theatre, until March 23
This new comedy-drama from actor and writer Neil D’Souza follows three 50-year-old friends - Dev, Chris and Michael - as they return to the Ibiza resort to which they went as 20-year-olds. It explores adolescence, ageing, male friendship and more, and Alice Hamilton’s production has garnered some glowing reviews: in her four-star write-up for The Guardian, Anya Ryan called it “a giddy feast of nostalgia and abandoned dreams.” You can get tickets via the button below.
Starter For Ten - Bristol Old Vic, until March 30
Actor-turned-novelist David Nicholls is having a bit of a moment. The Netflix adaptation of his 2009 blockbuster One Day has proved popular with critics and audiences alike, and his 2003 University Challenge-themed comedy Starter For Ten - memorably turned into a film with James McAvoy in 2006 - is now being made into a musical. Adapted by Emma Hall, Charlie Parham, Hatty Carman and Tom Rasmussen and starring Adam Bregman and Mel Giedroyc, it runs at Bristol Old Vic until the end of March, and will likely transfer afterwards. You can get tickets via the button below.
That’s all for this issue
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this newsletter or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk. Or you can find me on Twitter/X, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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