Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Stuffed
Ugly Bucket
Genre: Clown, Theatre, Verbatim Theatre
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The cast of five performers in Stuffed are dressed in orange emergency responder overalls and take over the stage space with energy, enthusiasm and bold movement. Every day conversations based on real interviews are a fascinating use of lip-sync and are sometimes as loud as the vibrating music score.
Review
Stuffed is Ugly Bucket’s latest show. A relatively new company, created in 2018, Ugly Bucket strives to make impactful original high quality shows about very important topics. By entertaining and enlightening through their physical clowning and other performance styles, Ugly Bucket hopes to make people aware of the issues and then to go and help directly.
Stuffed fits perfectly into the Ugly Bucket mission and is not only entertaining, enlightening, it is also impactful about an emergency of epic and surprising proportions that should not exist at all in today’s society in the UK. Food banks and food poverty are the topics and although the title might make one think about food as the topic, it is not.
Without giving too much away about this devised play by Ugly Bucket Theatre, directed by Rachael Smart and Grace Gallagher, in short it is a valiant and needed call to action. To actually help the cause is different from just thinking about the issues, so by the end of this play we are motivated to activate and to get active in a food bank in our community to help ease the pain of food poverty that is a surprising and growing situation in today’s UK. How and why did this happen?
The cast of five performers in Stuffed are dressed in orange emergency responder overalls and take over the stage space with energy, enthusiasm and bold movement. Every day conversations based on real interviews are a fascinating use of lip-sync and are sometimes as loud as the original dramatic vibrating music score. Their enactments of scenes with people discussing their situations and needing help immediately are heart wrenching, “Things are really bad” a woman yells. The time is now to activate, all of us! Some of the verbatim recorded conversations are matter of fact and even chatty as though the people experiencing poverty are not always complaining, they are simply living it and help is slow to come – this is their reality.
Examples of creative devising are when a brief simulation of the food bank process is cleverly recreated, and a scene with characters lacking knowledge of what they are doing when speaking only gibberish is hilarious! Several very brief vocal scenes are also expressed in short sequences of sign language using physical and facial gestures that work with the physical acting and recorded voices. A highlight is a game show with slick spotlight changes of red, amber, white, blue and green plus a masked character of a devil who is mischievous and cynical, with bouts of canned laughter! Poignant moments are stories about phone calls to the food bank and the various reasons callers get no help, or frustrating stories from people talking about how long they have to wait for benefits and the severity and impact on their lives.
A bouffon scene certainly hits the right tone in its raw details and is an outstanding use of the genre to express the particular story. Underlying all the creativity of Ugly Bucket to entertain us with their innovative staging and dynamic earnest performances their prescient message to us is strong, very strong.
