Tell us a bit about who you are and what you have at the Fringe.
We are TPTC, a female and queer-led theatre company who formed during their time at university. Our goal is to create politically-focussed work that has female voices at the core. This year, we’re bringing our new play COVENANT to the Edinburgh Fringe. Following on from an incredibly successful run with WITCHES last year, we felt primed to showcase a production as a newly independent company. COVENANT grapples with the legalities surrounding abortion in the UK, imagining a world where it is entirely illegal, and results in severe prison time. It is inspired by our personal experiences within the company, as well as the consequences of the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the US. Rachel, Gen and Bonnie are recovering from a massive party, but for some reason Bonnie cannot remember the night before. As revelations keep coming out, the tensions rise and Bonnie is forced to confront her mates about what on earth they’re hiding.
This is your second show you have brought to the Fringe. What have you learned from your first time that you have brought with you this time?
The second album is always a tough one, right? We enjoyed creating WITCHES so much, and are so proud of how it resonated with audiences. However, we felt this year was the perfect opportunity to push ourselves as artists, to create something more abstract and sinister than the naturalistic living-room play we brought last year. COVENANT is undoubtedly a challenging piece; it’s definitely darker and trickier. We’ve also been further challenged this year by self-funding our show. WITCHES was funded by our university, but now, upon graduating, we have saved and fundraised ourselves to get this show to Fringe. That, of course, comes with another level of stress, but we enjoy the ownership we have over the piece – it’s entirely ours.
When writing a piece for the Fringe, how do you negotiate big ideas with small spaces?
Restrictions truly foster creativity, and we use small spaces to our advantage. Our work falls into the ‘horror’ genre, and we feel the close proximity to the performance only works to enhance the terror in COVENANT. The audience feels encroached on by these women and their stories. We want to remind them that we’re never too far from the issues we’re exploring on stage.
Trigger warnings are often willfully misunderstood by pundits of bad faith as an excuse for audiences to avoid simple discomfort. Your show has several trigger warnings. What in your view is their place in theater?
Trigger warnings are an absolute necessity. Nobody can enjoy art without the knowledge of certain issues that might affect their experience. COVENANT deals with several difficult topics, and it’s very important to us that spectators who have direct experience with those issues feel able to access our work. All too often stories about violence or misogyny are inaccessible to those who relate to them most. We’re also conscious of navigating these issues within our creative process, and the wellbeing of our cast is our number one priority.
We know that our audiences will see elements of our show coming, because they are made aware of trigger warnings at the top of the performance. That challenges us to find new ways to create tension and suspense. They are by no means a dampener to our creativity – but something that pushes us beyond engaging with severe topics for cliché shock value.
What is the process of writing about the erosion of women’s rights at a time where you can feel the ground giving out beneath you?
The erosion of women’s rights is something that permeates all our lives. It doesn’t really matter what the story is, womanhood and the fear associated with that remains as an undercurrent in all our work. This does mean that the writing process can become emotionally challenging – we spend months inhabiting the minds of misogynists, and that definitely has an effect on our psyche. However, the process of creating something with a group of passionate, wonderful women is a perfect counterbalance to this. Writing characters in such an extreme situation, it can feel like the world is stacked against us, but we always end up finding a source of liberation through exploring these issues creatively. Our work keeps resonating with people, proving that there is a thirst to understand the fear felt by so many women.
Your work thus far has focused on female relationships, a subject that is finally allowing itself to bloom in theatre, film, and television, albeit slowly. Why are more modern versions of female relationships important and what do you hope your work expresses about them?
The female relationships we portray are frequently more complicated, twisted and painful than those we usually see in mainstream media. Female characters are too often two-dimensional, stripped of their complexities. Their relationships are thus simplified to the point that we don’t recognize them as something that could represent our lived experience. In COVENANT we depict women who are conflicted: the women we see haven’t been able to fully develop a sense of identity, and they exist in fear of their freedoms being further limited, actively hurting each other in the process. However, we hope that audiences see a maternal urge in our girls, as they try to love and protect each other in their own warped ways. Ultimately, despite everything their society does to split them apart, they always have each other; that was the inspiration for the title of the show. The covenant of female friendships is stronger than religion, than values or the legal system. That’s the image we leave our audience with, it’s what drives our characters and it’s what drives us too.
What seeds do you hope are planted in your audience’s minds upon leaving your show?
If the audience go away and think, discuss, or question the issues we put forward in COVENANT then we will have done our job. Naturally, our subject matter includes a range of issues through the discussion of abortion, but our hope is that the necessity of choice and accessibility rings loud and clear. A government that takes away abortion is a government that takes away the lives of its citizens.
Erin Murray Quinlan is an American playwright, amateur beekeeper, and confirmed solver of Cain’s Jawbone. Her full biography can be seen at www.erinmurrayquinlan.com
