Sluts With Consoles, Phoenix Arts Club
It’s day one of Camden Fringe 2025 so we’re beyond excitement at what the next four weeks have to offer. But even though the festival is now up and running, doesn’t mean we’ve finished with our interviews! We’ve still got four more days worth to bring you. You can find all the currently published interviews here.
GamerGate may have happened more than a decade ago, but the issues it raised feel as relevant today as they did back then. Taking GamerGate as her start point Alice Flynn‘s Sluts With Consoles is a show about the misogyny faced by women who dared to want to play videogames. But it’s clearly also a show that wants to be playful, and as Alice, along with Joe Strickland, Rachel Isobel Heritage, Cameron Moreton and Mia Harvey explain, there is a lot of fun to be had with Dogmouth Theatre‘s show if you head along to Phoenix Arts Club on 19 August for its sole Camden Fringe appearance (tickets here).
What can audiences expect from the show?
Alice: Sluts With Consoles is stupid, slutty and nostalgic. We wanted to make a show that is a love-letter to the games we grew up on, while still shining a light on the complicated relationship that the gaming community has with women. In Dogmouth’s manifesto, we talk about how as a company we want to make shows about the negotiations that women have to make with the patriarchy to survive under it, and Sluts With Consoles is very much a show about that.
It’s a show about loneliness, internalised misogyny, growing up as an outsider, and the desparate desire to belong, but it’s also very silly and has a lot of laughs for good measure. Gaming is supposed to be about having fun and escaping from the real world, but for many women who try to step into that space, the many layers of deep entrenched misogyny and hostility have ruined the escapism for us.
This is a show about reclaiming that while also acknowledging how we often, unintentionally, end up propping up these barriers. It’s fun, nerdy and has a real heart to it. Think Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World meets The Barbie Movie.
Is Camden Fringe going to be the show’s first time on stage, or have you already performed elsewhere?
Alice: We’ve performed the show at a number of UK festivals, including VAULT 2023, Brighton Fringe (twice), Lambeth Fringe, and Calm Down Dear Festival. This Summer, we’re embarking on our first ever UK tour as a company, taking the show to England, Scotland and Wales. We’ll be heading down to Camden just one week after we close our run at Underbelly Cowgate, so if you’ve got Edinburgh FOMO this Summer, make sure you don’t miss us for our Camden date!
What was your inspiration behind the show?
Alice: Being stuck at home during Lockdown and revisiting old games I hadn’t played in years brought back a lot of very complicated memories. I really loved Nintendo as a kid, but gradually stopped playing games around 2015, around the time that GamerGate was happening. It was a very difficult time to be a teenage girl in those online spaces; at first Gaming Forums felt welcoming to a lonely kid who was othered in real life for her nerdy interests, but the second people found out you were a girl, it was over. One moment you would be fetishised and put on a pedestal by teenage boys (and grown men) who wanted their very own Ramona Flowers, then the next you were being labelled a thot, a fake, and an attention whore. You were idolised by your male peers, yet also you would also be the butt of constant sexist jokes, degrading comments, and violent sexual threats made ‘in the heat of the moment’ between rounds of Mortal Kombat. To a kid who is desparate for community and acceptance, it feels less shitty to be part of a community that kinda hates you, than it does to have no community at all.
Many of the girls who grew up in that space, including myself, tried very hard to curate a ‘Just One Of The Boys’ image by putting down other, often more coventionally feminine, women as a way of drawing negative attention away from ourselves. I wanted to make a show about that experience, and the discomfort of sitting with your own internalised misogyny. The show actually takes it’s name from a comic by a female artist where she declares herself ‘a real gamer girl’ and shames another girl for being ‘just another slut with a console’ for the crime of wearing false eyelashes and taking a selfie. I cringe at it now, but at the time I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with that, and clearly millions of other people didn’t either because that post is still floating around out there.
As much as we sell Sluts With Consoles as a show about video games, it’s not really about them at all. It’s about girlhood, otherness, and the need for solidarity between women. I wrote this play for my teenage self, and for girls (and women) currently struggling with the same loneliness and internalised misogyny that I did.
How long have you been working on the play?
Alice: It’s been about three years since the first R&D in July 2022. It’s evolved a lot since then and I couldn’t be more grateful for the wonderful team I have right now who believed in it from the jump, at times even more than I believed in it.
Is this version how you originally envisioned it or has it changed drastically since you first put pen to paper?
Alice: In some ways, yes it’s changed a lot. In other ways it hasn’t – I feel like as time has gone on, it’s actually become truer to my initial vision for it than the first version of it was. We’re a feminist theatre company, so when I first said “Yeah, we’re doing a show about Pick Me Girls and it’s going to have ‘Slut’ in the title”, people were a bit thrown. We felt like had to tread REALLY carefully and were so worried that audiences might take us in bad faith, or we might get targeted by the same kinds of people who targetted Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian. We definitely self-censored a bit in the beginning. Now, we don’t give a fuck. We don’t feel the need to de-fang our message any more, and that’s even more important now that we’re kind of living through GamerGate 2.0 at the moment!
In the last three years, we’ve solidified our relationships with each other as a team and grown more confident in our ability to get our message across, even when it’s a nuanced one that might piss the right people off. I’m really lucky to have Rachel, Cam, Mia and Joe, who just got what I was trying to say with the show, instead of worrying about ‘What if people misunderstand it?!’ and have believed in it even more than I did. It’s so nice to work with people who have faith in your message and your ability to get it across.
What was it that drew you to this show and role?
Mia: I was first drawn to this show after seeing one of the early performances. I feel like theatre about things like video gaming and online spaces from a fresh and honest perspective is something that there isn’t a whole lot of out there, and I was really excited for the opportunity to play this character who represents the girls who get told that they aren’t ‘real’ gamers because the types of games they enjoy are perceived as feminine and childish.
What is it about your character that you most enjoy and what’s been most challenging?
Mia: The thing I most enjoy about Player One is how in touch she is with her inner child. She finds joy in having fun and being a bit silly and doesn’t feel ashamed of that!
This is a more challenging role for me than I first anticipated precisely because the character seems so similar to me personally. It’s easy to lean on what the character and I have in common (our love of pink, dressing up games, and dancing), but when I come up against the parts of the script where she says or does things that are more challenging to me, I have to be able to understand where she’s coming from and how she’s reached this point without making it a positive or negative judgement.
What brought you all together?
Alice: At it’s core, it’s our shared love of videogames and passion for making DIY theatre that’s brought us all together. We all have a very similar sense of humour too, which definitely helps! Everyone on the team has their own creative practice going on independently from their work on this project, and in many ways that’s what helps make the piece so textured because we’re all coming at it from different backgrounds and bringing unique skillsets. We’re all also VERY online, which means we all just sort of get the meme-y referential humour that Sluts With Consoles is built on.
Being a fringe festival, we all know sets have to be bare minimum, how have you got around this with your set and props?
Alice: The show basically runs on a PowerPoint, and all of our props fit neatly into two Mario-style ‘?’ boxes. We made the original version of the show on a budget of like, £4.50, a hairpin and a piece of gum, so we’re used to being resourceful and working with the bare minimum.
The show is also pretty abstract in nature, as the entire story takes place in a digital setting, so there aren’t any real world locations that we’d need to recreate with set. The fact that it’s basically entirely set in The Miiverse means that the stage can be as sparse, or as populated as we want it to be.
What has been the biggest challenge in realising the writer’s vision for the show?
Rachel: I think because the show has gone through a few of its own adaptations – in terms of script, casting and also many different locations – the challenge has been keeping up the same level of excitement and freshness to each performance. There are heavier moments of the play that always sink in deep when I see Mia and Alice play them out on stage, which can pull on you during rehearsal as well. However, the team are strong and each new venue, and new audience always manages to succeed in adding new touches, new laughs and new memories to the show. I think overall the piece has grown into a brand new beast, for the better, as a result of the journey it has been on.
How important is audience interaction to you?
Alice: We’ve definitely taken some inspiration from John Robertson’s The Dark Room, which (if you haven’t seen it) is a huge cult hit for nerdy theatre fans and features a LOT of audience interaction with it’s choose-your-own-adventure format. There’s definitely some of that energy in Sluts With Consoles already – Rachel and I are both big Bioshock fans, so we’ve really been enjoying playing with the audience and letting them wonder whether they’re really the ones in control or not.
My favourite bit of audience interaction in the entire show is when we let the audience choose Player One and Player Two’s names at the beginning, because you never know what they’re going to say!
Are there any plans for what comes next after the show has finished its run – for you or the show?
Alice: Yes! Prior to Camden, we’ve taken the show to South Street Arts Centre in Reading on 23 July, then heading up to Edinburgh for 10 nights at Underbelly Cowgate from 31 July – 10 August (tickets here). After Camden, we’re bringing the show to Porter’s Theatre in Cardiff on 10 October, and will be announcing more tour dates soon! You can find all the links for tickets and the info here.
If you had to describe your show as a colour what would it be?
Mia: If this show was a colour I think it would be purple – a mixture of pink/red and blue. The two colours seem very opposite but come together to make something really cool.
If you had to describe your show as a meal what would it be?
Rachel: A plate of mixed doughnuts… for personal reasons.
If your show had a soundtrack what songs would definitely be on it?
Alice: There’s this one remix on YouTube that mashes up W.A.P. with Dry Dry Docks from Mario 64 and it unironically bangs.
If you could perform this show anywhere in the world where would it be?
Mia: We recently had an audience member tell us the show should be mandatory viewing at Comic-Con so I’m going to steal that idea – a room full of all the people, especially men, who might have never considered the things this show brings up.
What is the weirdest or most unconventional prop used in your show?
Alice: I don’t want to spoil the show, but there IS a Freddy Fazbear cameo and it is NOT when you would expect it to be.
If budget or reality was not an issue, what’s the one piece of scenery/set you’d love to have in your show?
Alice: An actual Freddy Fazbear suit.
What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve received during your career, and how has it influenced your work on this show?
Alice: If you’re a writer-producer like me, my best piece of advice is to trust in yourself, trust in your ability to get your message across, and don’t be afraid to tell people how you want your work to be represented.
And don’t be afraid to trust the audience too – audiences are much kinder, much smarter and a lot more forgiving than many writers give them credit for when we’re staring at that millionth draft wondering whether it even makes coherent sense any more. Don’t be afraid to give them something complicated and meaty to chew on.
What words of advice/encouragement would you give anyone thinking about doing Camden Fringe next year?
Alice: Even if you’re afraid, even if you’ve never produced a show before, if you have an idea for a play or a show… just do it! Do a one-off, do a work in progress, do a workshop performance, do a 10 minute slot on a mixed-bill night.
If you have an idea for a show, the best thing you can do is just take the plunge and put it in front of an audience in whatever state it’s in, and then work out how to make it a full-on show. You will gain a lot of confidence and will learn a lot from the experience too!
Our thanks to the team for the chat. Sluts with Consoles plays at Phoenix Arts Club for Camden Fringe on Tuesday 19 August.
Further dates, including its EdFringe run can be found here.
