Wales’ leading new writing company, Dirty Protest, teams up with one of its leading writers, Alan Harris, at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe to present Sugar Baby, a brand new one-man comedy about a young, small-time Cardiff drug dealer, performed at Paines Plough’s ROUNDABOUT @ Summerhall.
Cardiff-based Dirty Protest have a strong reputation for creating lean, original, state-of-the-nation new writing productions from Wales. Their last Fringe show, Last Christmas by Matthew Bulgo, performed to rave reviews in 2014 including five stars from The Scotsman, transferred to Soho Theatre London and returned to Edinburgh in December 2016 for a run at the Traverse Theatre.
Playwright Alan Harris is no less admired at the Fringe. Love, Lies And Taxidermy, about a blossoming romance in Merthyr Tydfil, was also performed at Roundabout @ Summerhall last year, praised by critics and audiences alike. And his most recent play, How My Light is Spent, set in Newport, is currently touring the UK after an acclaimed run at Manchester Royal Exchange. Sugar Baby is the third in this unofficial series of three plays in which Alan shares his distinctive perspective on modern life in Wales.
Being a small-time drug dealer in Cardiff and living up to your family’s expectations is tough. Marc avoids his mum, disguises his cannabis plants with fake tomatoes at the allotment, and now has to bail his old man out of £6,000 owed to local loan shark Oggy. When he meets Lisa for the first time in years, things get even messier. Oggy wants Lisa. Lisa wants Marc. Marc wants to survive the day.
Rooted in Cardiff, Alan’s laugh-out-loud drama opens up the world of a small-time drug dealer to all of us, and asks us to examine our own connections to family and place, and what we are willing to do for cash. This new collaboration between two of Wales’ new writing powerhouses will be directed by Dirty Protest’s Artistic Director, Catherine Paskell and performed by Alex Griffin-Griffiths at Paines Plough’s ROUNDABOUT @ Summerhall, Paines Plough’s award-winning plug-in-and-play theatre.
Catherine Paskell said: “Dirty Protest are thrilled to return to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For the last 10 years, we have worked to promote and produce the best new writing from Wales, so that we can exchange and challenge ideas and beliefs about our complex contemporary world.”
Alan Harris said: “The world of Sugar Baby is a tough place to inhabit but, hopefully, an enjoyable place to be. Its characters live on the edge of society – literally on the edge of Cardiff – and even though their lives are dominated by being at the extremity of the social and economic scale, it’s a place of humour. It’s a mix of the real and the romantic – a snapshot of ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell.”
