Siblings: The Edinburgh Interviews 2019
Who? Siblings
What? Siblinginging
Where? Underbelly George Square – The Wee Coo (Venue 300)
When? 18:40
What are your feelings as you enter into this year’s Edinburgh Fringe season?
Disturbingly fine and worryingly excited. Of course, come July the panic will set, Maddy will be crying and binge-eating naked in the corner of a dark room whilst Marina will be profusely hoovering. This is our third year in a row as Siblings so we think we know what to expect but every year is so different, come day one we will be lost all over again like confused ferrets on crack.
What we are happy about is that we think we might be past the stage of playing human whiteboards now (a sketch in our first show where Maddy ran around in a bed sheet with a hole in the top and a silver swim hat to play an ‘interactive whiteboard’… The audience thought she was just having a break down). Maddy wants to bring it back, but we have now written characters who are humans. We love them so can’t wait to get back into our Wee Coo and show them to Edinburgh.
So long as we don’t gain a dad bod from the mac n cheese van outside the venue and destroy our liver with cider, it should be a good year.
What is the premise of your Edinburgh show this year?
Our shows have always been a strange mixture of sketch, character comedy, complete absurdism, trained clowning, classically trained acting and a whole closet full of violently synchronised dance. We both can’t dance, none the less it’s in there against all odds. We don’t have a name for what kind of comedy we have just created…. yet… Our show is an hour of real sisters playing characters from all walks of life, full of insanity and debauchery. It is a lot of fun and we want to suck the audience into our strange minds for an hour and leave wanting to party hard, whether it’s to aggressively dance away their trauma, or carry the full frontal energy we gave them straight to the Underbelly bars.
What is the biggest obstacle you face(d) while putting this show together?
It is very difficult to let go of a show that you know so well. Making a new show is incredibly exciting but also scary. You have to push further to start from scratch and really believe there are more characters and more sketches to be written. We also had a bit of a different year this year where Maddy was working in a big PR company and Marina was in an Ibsen in the theatre being professional, so we had to write late at night and early in the mornings and all weekends to make it work as best we could refusing to not do a trilogy of Siblings shows in Edinburgh!
Has your attitude towards the Fringe changed at all in recent years?
The Fringe changes every year, as do the shows, comedians and especially the way comedy changes itself! It’s very unpredictable which makes it exciting as you have no idea what or who is going to be the talk of the town each year. That’s our favourite part. For us, our main Fringe mantra is to try not to take it too seriously. There is so much that goes into a Fringe show, not just writing it but paying for it, organising it, admin is falling out of every orifice. It is easy to let it overcome you completely, you eat, sleep, breathe, sweat and wee out your Fringe show but once we are there we try to go with each day as it comes and have as much fun as possible. We have gone through our fair share of meltdowns in the years but we have always come out chubby and brave. Also, when in doubt, go to the mac n cheese van.
Do you have any other Edinburgh show recommendations?
SO many. This year is bursting with too many brilliant shows the list would go on and on. To name a few, we love Jayde Adams, Jordan Brookes, Christopher Bliss, Lucy Pearman, Roisin & Chiara, Double Denim, Rosie Jones, Zoe Coombs Marr, Yuriko Kotani. We cannot BELIEVE Celeste Barber is doing a Fringe show and we screamed and fainted when we saw the name Eric Andre in the brochure…
Where would you like to be in a year’s time?
O2 Arena.
