INTERVIEW | 'SPEED DIAL' SPIES LIKE US THEATRE, EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE

The countdown to the world's biggest arts festival Edinburgh Festival Fringe is on and arrives this month for its 75th anniversary. Between 5 - 29 August you can enjoy a diverse selection of work from across the UK in Scotland's capital city. 

Ahead of the festival, I have fantastic interviews coming up from some of the acts who will be heading there to showcase their work.

Today's interview comes from Spies Like Us Theatre. They are bringing their comedy thriller, Speed Dial to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 

So to begin with, tell us a little bit about Spies Like Us Theatre… What are your main influences in the work you create?

We are a multi-award-winning theatre company based in London. At a fundamental level, we’re incredibly inspired by physical theatre companies like Gecko, Frantic Assembly and Complicite. We also try to make very cinematic work and so often find ourselves referencing films. During Speed Dial we’ve taken lots of influence from Hitchcock films and some more modern films like Hot Fuzz! 

Generally though, our influences can come in any form. We try to stick up visual stimulus in the rehearsal room when we make new work and in the past that has taken many forms - from paintings to words. We’ve even had a picture of Lord Farquar on the wall for one of our rehearsal processes! 

What does it feel like to be bringing Speed Dial to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer?  

It feels very exciting! We’ve taken all our shows to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe since 2017 and we all met there in 2014 while performing with the Young Pleasance. It’s such an incredible place and we’re excited and intrigued to see how it will feel in a post-Covid world. 

You had some setbacks to presenting your work due to covid and company investment - is there enough funding for companies like you? Why is a platform like the Fringe therefore important? 

We did indeed. Financial support is always tricky to source in fringe theatre and I don’t think there will ever be enough to go between the ever-growing network of emerging artists. We’ve been lucky enough to be supported by Arts Council on this project, but it hasn’t been easy. Our last bid was successful on our 5th attempt! The fringe is so vital in allowing companies to platform their work and experiment at an affordable rate, so I think it's very important that the Fringe Society and all the venues remember that they have a responsibility to make it as affordable as possible for artists. 

Speed Dial is a comedy thriller - how long has it taken you to develop this work and where did your influences come from when putting it together?

The show has been practically in the works since 2019 and has been in discussion informally for a lot longer! The play is loosely influenced by a chapter from Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter Night A Traveller entitled In A Network Of Lines That Enlance in which a Professor is chased by the ringing of every phone he passes, so that was our starting point. Our three writers, Ollie Norton-Smith, Joe Large, and Hamish Lloyd Barnes, then began to build a wider world and narrative around that starting point and it grew from there. We then took a Work-in-Progress performance to VAULT Festival in March 2020 following a few weeks of R&D. When Covid hit, we took the time to rewrite the script in response to the WIP shows and we took a redrafted version to the Pleasance in March this year. Our show this summer will be the third incarnation of the show! 

In terms of artistic influences, as I said we took heavy inspiration from Hitchcock. It’s also interesting to see elements of our own university experiences imbued within the fictional university setting we’ve created. For example, the Dean of our university is inexplicably obsessed with bees - which is the symbol of Manchester, where Ollie and Joe went to university. 

When developing this piece of work was it collaborative and what main influences did each person bring if it was? 

We work extremely collaboratively and it’s such a joy to see everyone bringing their own flavour of movement and performance to the devising process. As I write this, we have just finished devising the final new movement sequence ahead of Edinburgh and it was amazing to work collaboratively to create something that really feels like it has a bit of everyone in it. 

As we have grown the company over the years and got new members in, one of the main joys has been the diversity of experience that new members bring. Having grown up doing theatre together, the founding members often have quite a similar style of movement which we can find ourselves getting stuck in. And so it’s really thrilling to have Evangeline Dickson, Elle Dillon-Reams and Genevieve Sabherwal, coming in and bringing a totally new perspective and allowing us to make something that feels really fresh to us. 

What made you use the 1970s as the setting for this piece? 

Honestly? Music was a massive factor. The sound design is such a huge part of our work - we often feel like our shows are musicals just without the singing. And so the groovy tunes of the era were a massive draw. 

Once we had that, we started thinking about how the other elements of the era would affect our story. Pre-Thatcher, it was a time when universities were still free but public funding was coming into question. That felt like a really interesting time to place the play, especially when we wanted to interrogate the merits of university education within the piece. 

Which part of this show do you feel audiences will enjoy the most?   

I think different people will enjoy different things - and we genuinely believe there is something for everyone. Lovers of physical theatre can sit back and enjoy the dizzying movement sequences, mystery fans can get out their notebooks and try and figure out whodunnit alongside our heroes, and comedy fans can sit back and have a good laugh. And if you like all those things - what are you still doing reading this?! Go and get a ticket! 

Has any of this show surprised you during its development?

I think after our first Work-in-Progress we were surprised at how funny people found the show. We never really set out to write a comedy, but I think as writers we naturally gravitate towards lacing humour through our scripts. It also helps to have a cast of very funny people who can make an audience laugh without a funny line. So that definitely surprised us a bit and led to us leaning into that aspect a bit more in later drafts and billing the show as a comedy-thriller. 

Why is this festival and your play important for people to see and support during August?

This festival is absolutely vital to the creation of new work in the UK and without it our company quite literally wouldn’t exist. We think our show, which above all is about family and the importance of human connection, is very timely after the pandemic. But above all, our show sets out to entertain, and I think we could all use an hour of good-humoured escapism after the last few years! 

What do you hope for in the future with Speed Dial after the fringe?

We are really hoping we can take Speed Dial on a UK Tour after the fringe. We’ve also always thought it would make a brilliant feature film, but that’s a tad more ambitious. But hey - if you’re a film producer or a very rich person reading this who likes the sound of the show… Our DMs are open!