Fuck The Special Guests

We made Fuck The Special Guests in the period that many drama students have when they’ve finished all their coursework but are yet to receive the results of their degree. All our friends were doing exams, so we thought we’d better make ourselves useful.

The show came about because Nina and Matthew wanted to make a show about live music, the experience of going to gigs and what it was like being in a band. It was made as a group devised show and in the making of it became a show about all of those things, but also about what it was like being a young person in a big city on a Friday or Saturday night.

We loved performing it. We first showed it in Theatre 2 at Bristol University, with the audience standing between two stages, free to drink and participate. We then took it to Edinburgh to mixed responses (but we won’t go into that), and also performed it at The Flaw Set, where it seemed to find its natural habitat as a show.

It marked the first show of the company proper, and started to hone our style – dark-hearted humour, pathos, short snappy scenes, a kind of accessible abstraction.

It also threw up many memorable company moments, including one of the performers sitting on the smoke machine in Edinburgh and filling the stage with so much smoke that the audience couldn’t see a thing for the first ten minutes of the show.

Devised by: Matthew Austin, Lucy Cassidy, Adam Gutch, Kath Yates, Tara Walsh, Nina Wyllie, Suzie Zara. Nic Davies performed in later performances of the show.

2002
1-11 August: C Venues, Edinburgh
15-16 October: Bristol University Department of Drama

2004
28 January: Seymours Family Club, Bristol
27 November: Cheltenham Social Club, Cheltenham
9 December: Club Heaven and Hell, Liverpool