Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Q & A with Clout Theatre
Returning to the Fringe for a third year, Clout Theatre have built up a following for their unique style of absurd and often violent physical theatre.
The Edinburgh Reporter asks them to share….
Q: Welcome back to Edinburgh!
Thank you, we had a great welcome back from Summerhall as one of only two returning companies from last year they decided to give us a medal! It even had a horse on it. Summerhall is a great home for us, with it’s macabre Demonstration Room (the excellently crumbly old lecture theatre where we perform), beer brewed on site and unique programming of the weird and the wonderful.
Q: This is your third year at the Fringe, have you noticed a change over the years?
With each year we have gained more of a following, with people coming because they know our name and are keen to see what coughs up next. Last year’s show ‘How a Man Crumbled’ really launched us, with national and international touring and support from the likes of the Battersea Arts Centre and the ShowRoom in Chichester, which was a real help when developing the next piece.
Q: Would you say you have refined your style then for each festival?
Each show is kind of a reaction to the previous one, we like to keep people guessing. That being said, one constant is absurd humour, that and covering Sacha (our petite ex-figure skating Franco-Russian Member) in something uncomfortable or impractical (jam, blood, enormous piles of paper…).
Q: How do you make your work?
We make our work by doing a lot of messing around and creating images and then stripping back, and finding a glue to put it all together. For this show we played with an awful lot of food and objects: fake blood, jelly, hot dogs, mayonnaise, talc, jam, milk, golf balls… the list goes on. We found ourselves inundated by all this stuff and then said: ‘This is ridiculous, we have to cut back on all this crap’. The same goes for the material we create, a lot ends up on the cutting room floor as it doesn’t fit with what we are ultimately trying to say.
Q: What advice would you give a new company starting out at the Fringe?
Keep going. Your first year might be a real struggle, but it is well worth it as each year you return, things will grow.
Q: What’s next for Clout?
A holiday. Then a run of The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity at Battersea Arts Centre, 7th-12th October.
‘The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity’ runs at Summerhall until 25th August at 3pm daily.
Tickets: £10 (£8 conc.) Tickets here on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe website.
‘The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity’ is supported by Battersea Arts Centre, ShowRoom Chichester and Arts Council England.
