ED FRINGE 2023 INTERVIEW | Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller, In Everglade Studio

With the Edinburgh Festival Fringe now underway, we’ve caught up with some of the artists and creative teams to chat about their work which is heading to the event in August. Today we’re chatting with Director Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller about In Everglade Studio.

1. Let's begin by pitching your show at the Ed Fringe, tell us about it? 

In an underground recording studio in 1974, four very different characters must record a rock & roll / Americana album overnight,  unaware that materials in the walls are driving them to the brink of insanity. As artistic and social tensions flare, the atmosphere grows thornier, the music grows stranger, and Everglade Studio’s mixture of creativity and claustrophobia demands its pound of flesh. There’s original music, eye-popping 1974 outfits, popcorn dialogue, and a  thrilling conclusion you won’t want to miss.  

2. Where did you draw your influences from for this piece? 

Thematically, this play is inspired by the uncomfortable and underappreciated history of rock n’ roll (a genre which we love), and the white millionaires who have profited enormously from a style directly rooted in Black creativity. 

In terms of influential pieces, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black  Bottom, the 1970s films Nashville and Vanishing Point, the brilliantly terrifying single-location setting of Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, the sprawling recording-studio tapestry in Peter Jackson’s Get Back, and the bone-dry rapid-fire witticisms of The Death of Stalin were major influences as well. This play began as an attempt to understand our beloved 1970s rock & roll through the lens of the genre’s complicated  (read: exploitative) racial history, and grew into an exploration of race and ownership within musical expression — so the playlists that accompany it range all over the map! Various country/western artists like Colter Wall, Charley Crockett, John Prine, and Bobbie Gentry influenced songs written to illustrate Skye’s perspective (the white  English country singer who dreams of being an Americana icon), while more genre-bending work was inspired by the likes of Low Cut Connie,  Delaney & Bonnie, The Doors, and Mary Wells (who gets a mention in the play) to reflect where Matilda (the Black singer and song arranger who is invited into Everglade Studio to shift Skye’s image) is coming from artistically.  

3. What are the challenges of bringing a piece to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe? 

Getting noticed! Fortunately, we have such an exquisitely talented cast,  including Alyth Ross, Hannah Omisore, and Aveev Isaacson (who also composed all the original music heard in the show!), so I fully expect they can get us heard over the Fringe cacophony.  

4.  What can audiences expect from your show? 

We hope to create a deeply entertaining show about music and its wonderful/terrible history, delivered within an experience so unique and immersive that word-of-mouth will spread like wildfire. We want audiences to end up humming our original 70s-rock and retro country-inspired tunes, while also contemplating the roots of the rock industry in exploiting Black artists, mesmerized by the visual intricacy of our lighting design and set detail, and feeling like they had a great time. 

The experience is both familiar and unlike any show you have seen. It is a psychological thriller, it’s comedic, it’s stylish, it’s fast, it’s sharp,  it’s sweet at times, brutal in others, harrowing here and there, and dripping with a constant sense that some deep-seated societal differences and hatreds may be insurmountable without either aggressive confrontation or artistic collaboration — or perhaps a  ferocious combination of both. 

5. What are you most looking forward to during your time in Edinburgh for the festival? 

I look forward to reconnecting with this wonderful city and exploring how other writers are exploring new avenues in playwriting and show concepts! This is such a marvellous place for new and beautifully odd ideas. Bring on the beautifully odd, please. 

6.  What are the main things within your piece? 

Musical performance as a window into narrative development. It’s not all what they are singing to each other, it’s also how. Plus, how is everyone else reacting? Why are they singing this song now? Are the performers singing with each other or against each other? How does the inflexion of their voice indicate what fiery backlash is coming up once the song finishes? This show is crafted to draw you into the psychological claustrophobia each character experiences in their own way, while experiencing a collective mania down there in Everglade  Studio — see if you can follow what’s driving each of them crazy and why… 

7. Where can people come and see your show? 

At The Box! A lovely Assembly venue in a shipping container by  George Square Gardens, at 1pm every day (except the 14th & 21st!).  Hope to see you there!