Jake Mace
Five girls taking you on a journey through the 13-year history of their friendship is the offering from Knockout Productions for this year’s EdFringe.
From the ‘Echo Falls infused highs’, to the explosive, ‘tit-for-tat’ style lows, this former friendship group have reached breaking point, and now need to decide whether or not the bond that they’ve shared for so many years is even worth salvaging at all. Oh, and then there’s their therapist named Fanny.
We wanted to hear more about what inspired the show, and what audiences can expect as they come to watch Tit(s) for Tat next month. Join us for a pixelated pint.
Catch Tit(s) for Tat between August 19th and 24th at 13:05. Tickets are available through the EdFringe Box Office.
Jake: Tell us about your show’s journey from creation to ending up at the EdFringe stage?
Knockout: Well we’ve decided that in order to answer this question fully, we’ll have to take you right back to the beginning of Knockout Productions. We are a fairly new company, with ‘Tit(s) For Tat’ being one of the first of what we hope to be many projects produced under Knockout Productions. Company Directors (Eva Ceroni Marti, Alice Kellar and Katie Suitor), all met whilst at Drama school and were all studying an MFA in Professional Acting. As part of the course, practically a whole year was given to theatre making. In essence, the girls were taught how to form companies, how to develop ideas into writing into performance, and how to create and produce their own work. It was also during the development of their first project, “Knockouts”, where the girls began to fully understand what kind of work they wanted to make and more importantly, why.
We love comedy, we love women, we love writing about the experiences we’ve had as young women and we love finding humour in everything – and all of that good stuff can be found in our brand new show: ‘Tit(s) for Tat’! We started working on “Tit(s) for Tat” in January 2024, after one of our company directors returned back to London from her hometown post Christmas, and had made the quite awful realisation that the friends she’d grown up with, were now total strangers to her. Now, what do writers do when they experience something brutal like this? They write a play about it, DUH! After we had that initial seed of an idea, we wrote draft after draft, we hosted our own scratch night to get our work in front of an audience, we welcomed two more cast members into our Knockouts family and we rehearsed for two months in every free rehearsal space we could get our hands on (which is extremely hard and actually a skill considering we’re also London based)! And now…previews time baby! As we’re sitting here writing this, we are all simultaneously experiencing the stark realisation that our London previews at The Courtyard Theatre are only…1 week away. Wish us luck!
Jake: Tell us about the inspiration behind your show and why you think its themes are relevant to an audience in 2024. Think – why am I telling this story now? Who will it connect with?
Knockout: Quite interestingly, the inspiration behind our show comes from a real-life situation our Company Director and Writer had during her visit back home during Christmas 2023. She’s been living away from home now for the best part of 7 years, and every year it’s felt like the friendships she’s had since school, have been slowly but surely fading, and it finally hit her that these people that practically raised her, that she’s known since she had braces and a side fringe in Year 7, that at one point she would call her bestest friends in the whole wide world, are now in-fact complete strangers to her, and her to them. They don’t know each other whatsoever anymore. And so, that got us thinking about how many other people have experienced this feeling of outgrowing your childhood friendships, of feeling like strangers to each other, of feeling like you don’t belong anymore? And it just so happens to turn out, that the more people (and this is people of all ages by the way) we spoke to about this, the more we realised that it seemed to be an almost universal experience, like a right of passage into adulthood if you will, and so we realised we had something special, something worth writing about.
Of course, this all sounds extremely deep and thought-provoking. The play could not be further from either of these descriptions. We obviously want our piece to connect with a wide range of audiences, of people who’ve experienced the above, but we also want it to connect with people who are looking to simply have a laugh and feel as though they’re being entertained. People who enjoy finding the light and humour in life. It’s important, you know. Don’t ever forget it. We don’t.
Jake: What are you hoping the audience will walk away thinking/feeling, and how do you aim to achieve this on stage?
Knockout: So we did open this question up to the rest of the cast, and one of the answers that struck us the most, and the one we agreed with the most, was this: ‘I just want people to think ‘oh that was bloody hilarious I’ve had a right laugh’. And this is so true!!! This is one of the main reasons why we write and produce the work that we do. We want our audience to have a laugh! To enjoy themselves! So we write scripts that are funny. We create characters that are funny. We include physical comedy, meta-comedy, any sort of comedy – we employ it!
During our scratch performance back in March, the majority of particularly female audience members with close-knit friendship groups, were already making connections between the characters on-stage and their real-life friends. A ‘Who’s who’ if you will. You know how all British friendship groups know who would be who if they were the Inbetweeners? The show is 100% relatable and we think audiences will be able to relate people/friends in their lives to the characters they see on stage in front of them. Of course, this comes from both the writing and hours of character development during which we discussed the friends we have in our lives and how we can create characters that are on the border between being universally archetypal but also totally unique and complex in their own right.
The dialogue is fast-paced, full of witty remarks and comedic one-liners. The characters are bold, eccentric, relatable, multi-faceted, raw and real. None of this ‘beautified’ and ‘softened’ depiction of women we still see so much of in theatre.
Jake: Now that we’re gearing up for Fringe season, what are you most excited for?
Knockout: Well, for starters, Edinburgh is probably one of the most beautiful cities ever, so how amazing it is that we get to spend some of our summer there?! The atmosphere of the Fringe is also second to none. It’s like you can’t describe it to people who have never been. It’s just such a hub for creativity and talent and we’re so excited for the opportunities that may come our way in terms of development and the next stages post-fringe. Aside from all of this, one of the main things we’re excited for is to test our show out on Fringe audiences. We have been rehearsing this for so long now, that we’re almost numb to just how funny the script is and how many fantastic moments we have in there. We’re feeling ready to share it with people because we know it will inject so much energy and buzz into our performances and remind us of just how fab the show really is.
We’re also aiming to expand the show to 90 minutes post fringe, for future performance opportunities and project growth. In order to do this, we need…feedback. Not only from reviewers, but from our audiences. We need to feel what works and what doesn’t. We need to listen to people who come to watch, to encourage them to share what they thought of the show, because no show is ever perfect and there is always room to grow and improve. We’re not precious about our work but we do have big plans for it, and really do believe that this show has something special that would work on larger-scale theatre stages and potentially even the screen!
Jake: Fitting with the themes of our magazine, if your show was an alcoholic beverage, what would it be?
Knockout: EASY! It would be a Gordon’s Pink Gin (double) and Lemonade from Wetherspoons and it would be ordered by a 17 year old girl who has her older sister’s ID.
Phoebe Bakker
