After creating and workshopping this piece in 2019 we have been accepted into the Brighton Fringe Festival! We are so excited to bring this show to a wider audience, but we need your help.

In a seedy dive-bar, everyone’s favourite fool Feste is putting on a show to reveal the sordid truth about Illyria. Welcome to the party to end all parties! The Feste Show is a queer cabaret-play remixing Shakespeare, retro club bangers and filthy jokes. It is a camp, subversive prequel to Twelfth Night and explores the lengths we go to in order to be the hero of our own story.  

This funny, irreverent and often moving show has been accepted into the Brighton Fringe Festival, 2020 from May 11th-17th @ The Electric Arcade: The Gaiety. In this club act expect a big dollop of hastily applied mascara, flirtatious audience interaction and some serious shade to be thrown.

The Feste Show is directed by Owen Horsley - who directed Salome and Maydays Royal Shakespeare Company, and has just been announced as co-director of the RSC's upcoming Wars of the Roses season Autumn 2020 - and is written and performed by Harry Waller (Much Ado About Nothing, RSC & America Is Hard To See, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) .

We developed the piece in 2019 working towards a workshop staging at the PIT Loft, NYC last June. The audience response was incredible.

Some audience quotes on The Feste Show:

"Joyously wicked! A delight."
"I  loved Feste, fast-paced fun with a glitter strewn dark heart!"
"It combines sparkling mischief with translucent vulnerability."
"I saw The Feste Show once and immediately wanted to watch it again."

 

 

We learned a lot from the workshop production and for this next stage of its journey we have made some fundamental changes to the structure of the piece, added new songs and focused the storytelling. We're really excited to see how the show plays now.

The Feste Show is very queer and quite filthy, so it is very much aimed at Brighton Fringe's thriving LGBTQ+ community and is probably not suitable for youngsters. The show is fundamentally about learning to embrace our most vulnerable truths and stripping away the masks we where to protect ourselves, a message that most queer people can relate to in some way. 

Owen Horsley’s previous directing work has been seen at the RSC, The Queen Elizabeth Hall, Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street and at Classic Stage Company in NYC. He is also an Associate Director for Cheek By Jowl and Artistic Director of Bard City. www.owenhorsley.com

“Terrific five star production” - The Guardian onMaydays @ The RSC

"Wilde would have loved this!” - The Sunday Times on Salome@ The RSC

Harry Waller is a British actor and writer based in NYC. He has appeared at the RSC and in the West End (Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Christmas Truce and Wendy & Peter Pan) and Off-Broadway (Puffs @ New World Stages). Harry most recently appeared in Life Jacket Theatre Company’s sold-out Edinburgh Fringe hit America Is Hard To See (5***** - Fest Mag, ThreeWeeks, The List, VoiceMag, Arthurs Seat, A Younger Theatre, Everything Theatre, British Theatre Guide). He is an Associate Director of Bard City. www.itsharrywaller.com

“The performances are fascinating… Harry Waller's Chad is particularly multi-dimensional, possessing a kind of likeable guilelessness” - The Skinny on American Is Hard To See

“Harry Waller’s beautiful voice along with the sentimental love songs … leaves you feeling like you’ve had a hot toddy or a warm embrace.” - Attitude Magazine on Much Ado About Nothing

Bard City is a theatre company based in London & NYC with a focus on Shakespeare training and presenting innovative new productions reinventing classical works. We run regular “Shakespeare In A Week” workshops, pulling together a group of actors and creating a fully-staged workshop production in just 7 days. We also run weekly informal “Shakespeare Workouts” giving actors the chance to explore text and character in a low-pressure, fun environment. 

 Listen to songs from the show here: https://harrywaller.bandcamp.com/releases

Putting on theatre in not cheap and as a fledgling company we do not have access to larger investments that more established companies might. We need your help in order to make this show happen. Your donation will be used for:

We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to consider supporting our project. We cannot wait to share this crazy show with you!