Winner of the 2017 Assembly Roxy Theatre Award (The ART Award), Scribble is a piece of new writing about mental health and supernovas from Andy Edwards, directed by Amy Gilmartin.
Edinburgh-based actor and graduate of Edinburgh Napier University, Alan MacKenzie, has joined their production in the lead role of Ross. Alan’s previous theatre credits include Movie Time (Mull Theatre), Friends Electric (Visible Fictions), and most recently Sea Wall (Heroes Theatre) at the New Diorama Theatre as part of the Incoming Festival. Alan also took on the title role in Hamlet at Bard In The Botanics in 2014.
The production is a two-hander and the creative team are taking an innovative and ambitious approach to casting the play by featuring a different actor playing the supporting role in each performance. He will be joined each day by a different performer selected from a group of actors, which includes graduates from prestigious drama schools across the UK and multiple award-winners. Each actor taking on the supporting role will be performing for the first time each day script unseen with no rehearsals beforehand.
This means that as a piece of work Scribble is never finished because the treatment of mental health is a continual, ongoing process. The creative team took this decision in response to NHS statistics which show that approximately 1 in 4 people experience a mental health problem at some point in their lifetime.
For them, this approach has two aims: firstly to represent the changing nature of individual mental health on a daily basis, and secondly to represent the range of people affected by mental health problems across society by working with actors from a variety of backgrounds. The performance will be different every day because our mental health can be different every day.
Scribble was developed last year under the guidance of Rob Drummond (Bullet Catch, In Fidelity) when Andy was selected for the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland Mentoring Programme. Development of the script was supported by the Tom McGrath Trust, and an early draft of the play directed by Amy was presented as a rehearsed reading at the Traverse Theatre’s 2016 Hothouse season for emerging Scottish talent.
Scribble is supported by The ART Award – a brand-new Award funded by Assembly Festival for developing Scottish performance companies in the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Tickets here
