Everything Theatre Reviews, interviews and news for theatre lovers, London and beyond
Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Coin Toss talks about the return of their show.
The Coin Toss Collective (Rosie Mullaney, Sophia Oriogun-Williams, Weronika Dwornik, Sol Woodroffe, Ben Notice, Alyssa Thomas, Claudia Zita Kurucz) came together through Made In Bristol, a year-long theatre-making residency at the Bristol Old Vic. We caught their show FREAK OUT! at Camden People’s Theatre this April, where we said it was “a thought-provoking show that successfully uses a mix of drama, dance, and direct engagement to discuss a critical issue of our time.“
Since then they’ve been busy working on it more, and are now about to unleash the latest version on Edinburgh Fringe Festival at The Pleasance. So it seemed the perfect time to catch up with the team to find out a little more about the show.
Hi Coin Toss. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us about FREAK OUT!. It’s a punchy title – could you tell us a bit more about the show’s name and premise?
ROSIE: FREAK OUT! tells the story of a seaside town losing their homes to coastal erosion, accelerating due to climate change. At a fundraising party for a sea wall, difficult conversations rise to the surface as the local community slowly starts to fracture. It draws on research into affected communities by the University of East Anglia and incorporates interviews with people from affected areas. The show blends lots of genres, such as clowning, physical theatre and dance, audience interaction, interviews and archival video, into a high-energy, tragicomic theatrical cocktail. Things get very messy… literally. Without spoiling too much, a ticket to come and see FREAK OUT! also guarantees you a slice of cake and the opportunity to build a sandcastle on stage with us…
With the title, we had to decide this before we’d even made the show due to marketing deadlines! We had just started devising the show in our first R&D process (during the Made in Bristol theatre-making course at Bristol Old Vic we did together). At this stage, we had the basic premise of our show: Inside a house teetering on an eroding cliff edge, everyone parties while impending catastrophe lingers (literally) at its door. The title FREAK OUT! encapsulated this premise perfectly – both a homage to the iconic disco track ‘Le Freak’ by CHIC and a reflection of the characters’ descent into panic about their dire situation.
Coin Toss Collective have a “non-hierarchical” approach to devising theatre – what brought you all together to focus on the climate crisis?
SOPHIA: In the initial R&D process, we all brought in different stimuli which inspired us at the time; one of those was a podcast episode ‘Apocalypse Creep’ by This American Life. In the episode we heard about a woman called Jane from a coastal community in Pacifica, California who woke up one morning and her back garden had been swept away with the cliff edge. What intrigued us most about this story was that two weeks earlier she had held an El Niño party. An El Niño year is when the storms are especially strong, having a knock-on effect, causing stronger currents and in theory making it more likely to tear away at the cliffs. Nevertheless, at the El Niño party and in the spirit of ‘theory rarely translates into practice’, the neighbours dressed up mockingly in floatation devices, sporting life jackets, rubber ducks and inflatable rings. We wanted to further explore the attitude of ‘it happens, but it won’t happen to me’, climate deniers, and the importance of community in the face of crisis.
What kind of response does FREAK OUT! offer to the climate crisis?
WERONIKA: We observed a disconnect between the story of climate change in the UK, which frames it as a concerning but not urgent issue, and the reality of it. Why aren’t we freaking out? Why aren’t we discussing how the UK needs to adapt to this challenge? Every crisis is, in part, a storytelling crisis. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing the reality of the situation. Climate change is a global issue already manifesting locally, and just like in other places in the world, those at the forefront of it are already on society’s periphery. We want to bring urgency to the conversation about climate change in the UK and advocate for more radical action and timely adaptation.
FREAK OUT! confronts the audience with the knowledge that soon, we will all be in the same situation as the residents of Portsford unless we get to work and demand change, and here in the UK, we do have the opportunity to do that! We are one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases so when in the show we speak about communities within the UK asking for compensation, we hope the audience will transpose the conversation around loss and damage into a global context.
Could you tell us a bit about why having a UK setting was important to you?
SOPHIA: A quick Google search and you can find out that the UK has one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe. It was important for us to localise our play to the UK because telling the story of coastal erosion happening in the States didn’t feel like our story to tell and less relevant to UK audiences. The effect of the climate catastrophe is not just something that happens to other countries and if audiences could leave the show thinking about how it also affects their neighbour, then perhaps it would inspire some urgency.
This production has run twice now, once at Bristol Old Vic and once at VAULT Festival – how has it changed over the years?
SOL: It has changed a lot! Since receiving Arts Council funding and being able to work with incredible artists such as Papatango Prize-winning playwright Matt Grinter (Orca)and choreographer Anthony Matsena (Shades of Blue, Sadler’s Wells) we have really developed the show and taken it to the next level. The ensemble moments are much stronger for their involvement.
The games we play with the audience have changed as we try to keep the show live and exciting. We’ve tried to include a broader range of attitudes to climate catastrophe: fear and confusion, but also naive heroism and simply giving up. We’ve developed our clowns further, and we think the show is better at being silly but also digs deeper emotionally!
FREAK OUT! has a fluid approach to genre, and mixes lots of forms and styles together, including live art, clowning and multimedia. What inspired you to take such a collage-like approach, and how do you feel this shaped the show?
ROSIE: So taking a collage-like approach originally boiled down to how varied our theatrical tastes and preferences were as a group when we were first devising the show in 2022. Those of us in the collective who at the time had a background in or particular interest in performance art, clowning and experimental theatre devised the elements in the show influenced by those forms – such as our sandcastle-building segments and moments of physical theatre. The rest of us with an interest in “naturalistic” character drama and script writing created the show’s characters and wrote the dialogue scenes. (What has been so cool is since then we have all introduced each other to different genres of theatre we wouldn’t have previously engaged with and broadened our theatrical horizons so to speak!)
We have shaped FREAK OUT! into its “collage-like” style as we felt it was important for our audiences to not only connect with its characters, who are the mouthpieces for real people affected by coastal erosion, but we also wanted to weave in the abstract, absurd moments of live art and physical theatre to visually and viscerally bring the effects of climate change up close and personal for our audiences.
The show’s content warning mentions that “food is consumed onstage and offered to members of the audience” – how does audience interactivity play a role in this production?
BEN: Although not all our audience members may live in a coastal town, or even one that’s on an eroding cliff edge, climate change will affect us all. We use audience interactivity as a means to bring our audiences into the (very real) world of the play and emotionally connect with its characters and what they’re going through. Whether that’s through sharing cake with them, which raises questions of – who gets a piece? And how are we implicated in a situation which, on the surface, we think doesn’t affect us? Or our sandcastle-building interludes – which prompt our audiences to think about their favourite trips to the seaside and what the loss of the British coastline really means to us all.
How have the audience reacted in past productions, and do you have a lasting message that you want to leave the audience with?
ALYSSA: During the development of FREAK OUT!, we had a strong message in mind. Our stimulus was real people struggling through a real crisis, and we were passionate about enhancing the awareness of our audience through the story we crafted. But as you would expect, when faced with life-changing danger, people react differently and have opposing opinions on what to do next. As such, the characters you see throughout FREAK OUT! observe the same issue in different ways, with different solutions. Ultimately, we want our audience to walk out of the theatre with the lasting message that people affected by this issue deserve more support and that they, the audience, can help.
Audience members’ emotional reactions have varied throughout FREAK OUT! Many have not only found the show exciting and entertaining but also moving and thought-provoking. Quite a lot of people expressed that they weren’t aware of the severity of the issue and were curious to find out more.
Coin Toss Collective are “open to experimenting with ‘liveness” – could you tell us a bit more about the importance of liveness to you, and how it featured in the making or performance of FREAK OUT!?
CLAUDIA: Theatre is a live event! I might be stating the obvious here but it is this sense of immediacy, the experience of witnessing something before your eyes, that we lean into within the show to get the audience to feel how high the stakes are for the characters in FREAK OUT! A big theme that we explore in the show is risk — living in a town that is falling into the sea poses risk. And for some characters the risk is greater than others due to factors like financial circumstance or physical proximity to the edge of the cliff.
As actors hold their breath underwater, when the audience eat cake, or watch something they built be destroyed, the risk feels urgent and tangible. The audience are incapable of being passive spectators.
‘Liveness’ in FREAK OUT! pulls at our audience’s heart strings and invites them to feel the full spectrum of emotions as they become immersed in the world of this coastal town.
Considering the persistent threat posed by the climate crisis, are these themes and topics that you feel you’ll return to in future productions?
WERONIKA: We tried our best NOT to make a show about the climate crisis when we started devising this show originally, and here we are now. It’s been on our minds, and we had to make a show about it; although we questioned whether we have anything to add to the conversation. It ultimately ended up being a piece about that feeling. The many different takes on the issue and what needs to be done reflect the range of opinions present in the group. We enjoy working with difficult questions we don’t have good answers to, precisely because theatre provides a container for these contradictions and pluralities. Whatever we tackle next, I am sure it will hurt our heads as much as making FREAK OUT! did.
Many thanks to the Coin Toss Collective for taking the time to chat. They will be performing at The Pleasance for Edinburgh Fringe Festival between 31st July and 26th August. Further information and tickets available here.
