Interview: Louise Orwin, ‘Fame Hungry’

Ahead of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024, we’re chatting with a range of creatives who will be heading to the city over August to find out more about their shows. Today we’re chatting with Louise Orwin about Fame Hungry.

Can you tell us a bit about you and your career so far.

I’m a performance artist, writer and director who has been making work for the past decade or so. I make work that is provocative, political and slippery- and generally filled with a heady dose of pop culture. Many of my shows to date have dealt with themes around gender, violence and pop cultural and internet subcultures and trends, and often find me undertaking obsessive gonzo-style research around a question of theme that’s niggling at me.

One of my first shows Pretty Ugly was about my obsession with teen girl culture online – come on, they’re literally the unappreciated culture makers of the world. For that show I created three teenage girl alter-egos and lived online for a year- and the show tells the story of that journey and some of the horrific and surprising and tender things that happened over that year (including accidentally baiting a paedophile). The show went viral when it premiered at Camden People’s Theatre in 2013, and suddenly I found myself on breakfast TV all over the world, having had my cover very much blown. Making that show was such a whirlwind and let’s be honest, a series of very steep learning curves for a baby artist (being written about in the Sun and the Daily Mail was very much NOT cool for a performance artist trying to earn her stripes ok?), but I think it was also incredibly formative in terms of the ways I make work, and the kind of questions I come back to time and time again in my work. The next few shows I made looked into gendered violence on film, and within dominant pop cultural trends around sex and desire, but with this show (FAMEHUNGRY) I feel there’s part of me which is returning to my roots in some ways, to try and answer a question which began forming over a decade ago.

What is your show about?

FAMEHUNGRY begins with the question: what happens when a performance artist becomes a TikToker? And slowly (and potentially nightmarishly?!) morphs into a wider question around the existential threat that is facing the live arts right now, as we compete more and more with a widening world of screens and digital content for people’s attention. And if that all sounds very academic, then let me tell you, this is a very personal question for me. Where with Pretty Ugly I was asking a question about why teenage girls might seek validation and fame online (often with dangerous consequences), FAMEHUNGRY asks the obvious follow up question: in a world where fewer theatre tickets are sold everyday, can I turn to the internet to find my own fame and validation? And what can this tell us about the last 10 years and where we’re going next?

What was the inspiration for FAMEHUNGRY and what’s the development process been to get to this stage?

I started making FAMEHUNGRY after meeting a teenage TikToker called Jaxon Valentine. At the time they were 15 and had 50k followers on TikTok and it blew my mind. I wondered what the impact might be of having an audience that size at such a young age, but it also made me ask the gross and next most obvious question: as a performance artist who has toured the world, been written about in global media and taught in countless university courses, why I didn’t have an audience that size? [Spoiler alert: maybe because I chose one of the most niche parts of the artworld to make work in]. Over the next 4 years, Jax and I spoke frequently, with our lengthy conversations becoming a kind of scaffolding for the content and structure of the show. After that, I decided to take the next step: I asked Jax to mentor me to become a bona fide TikToker, and spent a year building up my profile and learning how to build an audience and following the way Jax had done. 

The show charts all of this research, but also brings the central question of it into a very live format: during the show I perform to both a TikTok Live audience and the theatre audience. During the show I set up a game for the TikTok Live audience: get me to 10,000 likes and I’ll do something amazing. The theatre audience then become voyeurs to this weird, desperate performance to a TikTok Live audience. The caveat being that the TikTok Live audience don’t realise they aren’t getting the full show- I don’t want to spoil the show so you’ll have to come and see it to understand what I mean, but let’s just say the theatre audience get to see a very messy behind-the-scenes version of the show- all the things that would absolutely get me kicked off TikTok. In this way the show asks what we’re willing to watch, and who the people are deciding what we’re allowed to watch. Let’s just say it’s a very live, messy, fun and dark show- and obviously with this very live element, I have no idea what will happen on any given night. FUN!! (And scary).

What made you want to take  FAMEHUNGRY to the Fringe?

I’ve been coming up to the Fringe with my work for years now, and this will be my 4th full run at Summerhall. Obviously deciding to take a risk on bringing your work up there can have its downsides [*cough* capitalism], but I truly believe there’s nowhere like it in terms of being an incredible showcase for you and your work, but also as a place to truly hone your craft. As someone who makes risky and experimental work, there are fewer and fewer spaces where you can present longer runs, and doing the Fringe gives you an amazing place to bed the work in, and really begin to understand the work. I often work from such an instinctive place, that it's only after premiering a piece of work that I really begin to understand the drives or motivations at the core of it- I think probably quite a lot of artists could resonate with that. And beyond all of that, the obvious thing to say is that I’m really proud of the work, and want to share it with as many people as possible!

Apart from seeing  FAMEHUNGRY, what’s your top tip for anybody heading for Edinburgh this summer?

As always, there’s so much at Summerhall that I want to see! But top tips would be Tim Etchells with Bert & Nasi, Shit Theatre, and checking out the international offerings there.

Why should people book  FAMEHUNGRY?

Come for the TikTok japes, stay for the existential crisis! Just kidding (sort of). I think FAMEHUNGRY is probably quite a zeitgeisty show in terms of the themes it’s dealing with (social media, the future, big tech), and I hope that people come away feeling like they’ve learnt something or had time to think through a knotty problem in a nuanced way, but really REALLY I hope they come away feeling the heart and humanity in the show. It’s taken me a while to try and understand that really what’s at the heart of the show is a question of hope: we’re living through times that feel fast and difficult and uncertain, and where there are lots of questions about what’s coming next, and where this is all leading us. These were all my questions when I started making the show, and through it, and really, through working with Jax (who as a Gen Z-er embodies the future) I did manage to find some hope. Maybe it’s just slightly about rethinking what the future looks like.  PLUS: the show is funny, silly, messy, dark, incredibly LIVE (see game element above), and features a whole host of surprises along the way. I really don’t think you’ll see anything else like it at the Fringe this summer. (Hard sell over).

When and where can people see the show? 

If you want to see FAMEHUNGRY, come down to Summerhall’s Main Hall from 1 - 26 August (not 12, 19) at 16:15