Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#81): Nonstop, PIGS FLY EASY RYAN

As anticipation builds for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, we’re catching up with a range of exciting creatives preparing to bring their work to the world’s largest arts festival this August. In this series, we delve into the stories behind the shows, the inspiration driving the artists, and what audiences can expect.  Today, we’re joined by NONSTOP to chat about their show, Pigs Fly Easy Ryan.

Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it? 

Pigs Fly Easy Ryan is a show about two pigs, Mayahee and Mayahoe, attempting to fulfil their lifelong dream of impersonating air hostesses in order to secretly fly in a plane to the land of Freedom. We’re essentially inviting audiences along for a 1 hour flight in which they will be psychically transported to a fluorescent, sex-riddled abyss, guided by these mysterious porkers searching their souls and the stratocumulus for the essence of liberty and life itself.

We made the show because we had a 10 minute slot at a cabaret made by some people we really looked up to, and our best idea to impress them was to make an act inspired by a fever dream Lou had in hospital about being demonic air hostesses bouncing up and down on evacuation slides.

From this rather silly point onwards, we became infatuated with air travel; specifically, all the hallmark rituals of navigating an airport and an airplane. We loved making safety procedures into sordid, horny routines, subverting activities like declaring your liquids at security and practising a brace position into really rabid affairs. But the more time we’ve spent making the work, it started sprouting these unwieldy, baffling questions: when do rules cease to protect us, and instead, potentially inflict harm upon us? Which bodies are more vulnerable to objectification under the rule of others? And what does it mean to cross a boundary, whether that boundary is law-enforcement or self-instated by an individual?

We’ve been making this play against a backdrop of rising global fascism in the West, climate disaster globally, and techno-feudalism gaining rapid traction. It has felt absolutely impossible (and in no way desirable) to separate the work we’re making from these contexts. We’re also mainly receiving this kind of information through social media, which is churning up horrific images right next to videos of animals doing dumb stuff, beauty tutorials, memes, etc. So the show is really trying to bring the audience into that experience we’ve had as terminally online people. 

What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?

We are proud recipients of the Untapped Award 2025! It’s been a dream come true to get such an incredible platform to share our work, and to ease the financial burden of getting to Edinburgh. I think we’ve all had itchy feet to bring a show to the Fringe for a long time now - we’re incredibly excited for this show to be our debut, because it’s going to be an unhinged kind of HQ for us and our audience to collectively process the discombobulation, despair and hope in fleshy, real-time together. We also think it’s a bit out there and audiences at the Fringe are game for watching artists do some gnarly stuff in front of them. 

How would you describe your show in three words?

Lobotomy-Core Filth

What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?

Audiences of Pigs Fly Easy Ryan can expect to feel like mucky little pigs who have just been shot ass first out of a canon, bombing through the heavens dissociating from their physical forms until they reach a state of spiritual reckoning that distils them into their priest selves, transforms irreversibly for the future. Also you’ll feel like you just got laid. 

What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?

Drink Night Nurse like its water and don’t trash talk people who do the silent disco through the streets, because cynicism makes us bitter and everyone should have a nice life. 

Where and when can people see your show?

Underbelly Cowgate, Iron Belly at 8:10pm! We’re there for the whole festival! Come! 

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