Roger Francis on I’m a Philosopher! Why the F*** am I Here?
After the success of our 2025 Camden Fringe Interviews, we thought it only right to attempt a repeat for 2026. So throughout July we’ll be publishing new interviews each day to give a taste of what to expect from London’s best fringe theatre festival. The festival starts Monday 3 August this year, so we may give ourselves a couple of days off inbetween the end of the interviews and the first shows… then again, we might not.
You can find out more about Camden Fringe, along with details of every show playing this August here. You can also find all of this year’s interviews as they are published here.
What happens when you drop history’s greatest thinkers into a reality television jungle camp, give them an anarchic soundtrack ranging from the Andrews Sisters to Bowling for Soup, and hand the eviction button directly to the audience?
You get I’m a Philosopher! Why the Fuck am I Here?, an interactive musical comedy pastiche making its way to The Cockpit this August for Camden Fringe 2026. Produced by Make My Show, this raucous production blends the cabaret energy of Oh Mary! with the clever wordplay of Tom Stoppard.
We chatted with creator Roger Francis to explore the production’s 36 different possible endings, the crucial importance of exploiting live theatre, and exactly why there is a bowl of ostrich eyeballs in the rehearsal room.
If you had to describe the vibe of your show in just one sentence, what would it be?
It is an interactive, lip-sync, musical comedy pastiche of reality TV that involves audience participation throughout and offers a night of funny, frivolous fun.
Why is 2026 the absolute perfect time for this show to be seen?
Because, despite being ostensibly flippant and very silly, the real message is that now, in 2026, we all have to stop arguing about how the world should be run and start doing things to save it.
This show boasts an incredibly unpredictable structure. How drastically has it changed since you first put pen to paper?
It has expanded a lot since I started writing it! In particular, we now give the audience complete control via live voting over who gets evicted and who plays the games. As a result, there are at least 36 different ways in which it plays out, depending upon what the audience decides on any given night. We’ve also added elements of voluntary audience participation, more songs and dances, and there’s also a bear!
With 36 different narrative paths, how important is audience interaction to the DNA of the show?
It’s absolutely crucial. The audience completely determines the path through the play, and audience members participate in other ways too, but only if they want to, of course!
What classic theatrical or pop-culture pieces served as the biggest inspirations for this mashup?
Apart from the obvious debt to a well-known reality TV programme that’s set in a jungle camp, the show owes a lot to Monty Python and to Dennis Potter, whose characters used to interrupt the drama by bursting into lip-sync singing to old show tunes; we do the same. Other theatrical influences are also important; I like to think of our show as a kind of mixture between the raucous cabaret vibe of Oh Mary! and the clever wordplay of something like Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.
The soundtrack sounds beautifully chaotic. What can audiences expect to hear?
It is! The songs range all the way from the swing styles of the Andrews Sisters to the pop-punk energy of Bowling for Soup.
If your show was a meal at the venue bar, what would it be?
A bowl of ostrich eyeballs. You have to come to the show to truly understand why!
What is the most valuable piece of career advice you’ve kept in mind while building this piece?
That live theatre has to exploit the fact that it’s live, otherwise people will just stay at home and watch reality TV! That philosophy drove the entire interactive structure of this script.
If you could perform this show absolutely anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Maybe in the Parthenon, just to make the spirits of Socrates and Aristotle wonder what on earth they started.
If the show functions as a love letter to a specific historical figure, who gets the honours?
I think it has to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau, although I think Judith Butler comes out of it very well too.
Many thanks to Roger for the chat. I’m a Philosopher! Why the Fuck am I Here? comes to The Cockpit from Thursday 13 to Saturday 15 August as part of Camden Fringe.
