'It's like a weird mirror.' Fringe stars Xhloe & Natasha and Sh!t Theatre meet for the first time
Fringe stars Xhloe & Natasha and Sh!t Theatre are both award-winning theatre duos with cult followings, but they’ve never met. Fiona Shepherd introduces them.
Once upon a time, there were two talented, charismatic performers, one with short hair, one with long hair, who packed everything into a trunk and headed off to seek their fortune at the biggest show on earth.
Their names were Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, and collectively they were the wryly named Sh!t Theatre, Their names were also Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland, but you can call them Xhloe & Natasha.
Both duos are influential Fringe First-winning festival mainstays with cult followings for their idiosyncratic catalogue of shows. Sh!t Theatre are London-based purveyors of immersive theatre, in that they will immerse themselves in topics ranging from clinical trials to precarious renting to body farms and return to tell the tall tale. Xhloe & Natasha are a New York-based clown duo interrogating American icons from cowboys to soldiers to Stepford housewives.
The two duos, though, have never met - until The Scotsman brought them together via the power of a transatlantic Zoom.
Xhloe and Natasha, meet Becca and Louise - what do you make of each other’s work?
Xhloe: It’s like looking in a weird mirror - duo, one short hair, one long hair, politically engaged with a clown bend to it, two performers doing their DIY thing feels very akin to us. But I keep seeing you described as “documentary theatre” and I’d be so curious to hear more about that.
Becca: We haven’t invented documentary theatre, but it’s shorthand to describe something that’s not being other characters. It’s not because we wouldn’t like to…
Louise: …it’s that we cannot act.
Becca: We haven’t seen your work but we had a half decade hiatus [from the Fringe] when you swooped in and smashed it.
Xhloe: We filled the gap that you guys left. We saw the job listing and had to fill the role.
Becca: How did you end up coming to the Fringe?
Xhloe: We were interested in Fringe festivals and the big one we’d heard of was Edinburgh so we missed our rent payments and bought plane tickets and hostel nights and came for the first week in 2022 with no knowledge, did not research anything.
Natasha: We also won a Fringe First and we didn’t know what that was either.
Louise: Winning a Fringe First on your first Edinburgh is the thing that people apply to Edinburgh Fringe dreaming will happen.
Xhloe: We thought it was a participation trophy.
Natasha: Cos it was our first Fringe!
Xhloe: We couldn’t get the email to load and then locked our phones cos we didn’t pay for phone service abroad so we were relying on hostel wi-fi.
Natasha: And then they said “we need your names for the plaque” and we thought “a plaque? I think this is a big deal”. And then we went back to our day jobs. I was teaching kids how to ride bikes and thinking “none of you know I just won a Fringe First”.
Any fond Sh!t Fringe memories?
Louise: The first year we were in the paid Fringe we were kicked out of our venue so that an Alaskan choir of about 30 people ranging from the age of six to 88 could do this Christmas show for four days. It was actually just a winter-based show and right at the end they all went…
Louise and Becca: …and a Merry Christmas!
Becca: We had to share our dressing room with a goat in a dance piece that happened after our show.
Louise: And the dance piece was so good it didn’t even need the live goat.
Tell us about the shows you are bringing this year.
Natasha: Our show is brand new.
Xhloe: For brand new, read “not done”. Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It is the story of two punky Appalachian teenagers in the late 1990s who start faking Bigfoot sightings in their town and because their town is particularly situated to be a little more superstitious it takes off in a way they don’t expect and gets out of control. We grew up in Maryland. We were these bored teenagers causing a ruckus in our town. It’s not autobiographical in any sense but it is a love letter to teenage girlhood.
Natasha: It’s fast paced, it’s absurdist and it’s movement heavy but it’s got its own thing happening.
Xhloe: We’ve got a massive puppet. We always use movement and dance but puppetry is a new thing for us. We’re trying to be in conversation with US politics and the concept of the big scary monster but if the big scary monster is a puppet there’s a bigger scarier monster out there.
Louise: I see a link already. Our show is the first time we have a big puppet on stage.
Becca: It’s a two-person mega musical called Evita Too about Isabel Peron who was the wife after the famous Evita. Juan Peron was exiled, met this go-go dancer in a nightclub called Happy Land and they move to Franco’s Spain.
Louise: Evita’s body was then shipped to Madrid and installed in a glass coffin over their dining table. So Isabel lived with her more successful predecessor literally looming over her. She was then president of Argentina while Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice were writing Evita.
Becca: So they somehow missed her story and were writing about this beautiful young dead woman instead. It’s often these impoverished powerless teenage women who are written about.
So there’s a teenage girl thread in both shows…
Becca: We have been thinking about this show for a million years. We’ve had so many versions of it. We had one version where we had two people playing our interns and they read the entire script and we just sat there on deckchairs drinking. We did one version of the show where we had an intern who was a Spanish brain surgeon who turned out to be really good at dancing and singing.
Another coincidence is that both companies are moving on to different Fringe venues this year.
Xhloe: We were with theSpace UK our first year for just a week and they were the only reason we were able to come back a second year.
Natasha: Or a third.
Xhloe: Or a fourth…
Natasha: So we’re excited that we helped them get more attention.
Xhloe: I think that the spirit of the Fringe is that you find these gems in these small makeshift rooms. This year we’re going to be in the Main Hall at Summerhall which we’re really excited about. It’s not the case that we got too big for theSpace UK, it’s just that every show has different needs.
Becca: We had a great time at Summerhall, we’ve been there for so many years. It’s a bit nerve-racking going somewhere new but we’ve heard so many good things about Zoo. A puppet of a corpse has to fall from a ceiling and there’s only so many places you can go for that.
Any last words for each other?
Natasha: You are so invited to our show and we’d love to see your show.
Xhloe: Maybe we can compare puppet notes some day.
Louise: Who’s making your puppet?
Xhloe and Natasha: We are!
Louise: Ours is made by Freddie Hayes, she’s brilliant. And she’s also a clown…
Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It, Summerhall, 9.10pm, until August; Evita Too, ZOO Southside, 6.25pm, until 30 August
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