Coin Toss talks about the return of their show FREAK OUT!

The Coin Toss Collective (Rosie Mullaney, Sophia Oriogun-Williams, Weronika Dwornik, Sol Woodroffe, Ben Notice, Alyssa Thomas, Claudia Zita Kurucz) came together through Made In Bristol, a year-long theatre-making residency at the Bristol Old Vic.

Coin Toss Collective are returning to the Edinburgh Fringe with their show FREAK OUT!. We caught up with them to find out more about the show, and how it has evolved since its previous runs at Bristol Old Vic and VAULT Festival.

Hi Coin Toss. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us about FREAK OUT!. It’s a punchy title – could you tell us a bit more about the show’s name and premise?

ROSIE: FREAK OUT! tells the story of a seaside town losing their homes to coastal erosion, accelerating due to climate change. At a fundraising party for a sea wall, difficult conversations rise to the surface as the local community slowly starts to fracture. It draws on research into affected communities by the University of East Anglia and incorporates interviews with people from affected areas. The show blends lots of genres, such as clowning, physical theatre and dance, audience interaction, interviews and archival video, into a high-energy, tragicomic theatrical cocktail. Things get very messy… literally. Without spoiling too much, a ticket to come and see FREAK OUT! also guarantees you a slice of cake and the opportunity to build a sandcastle on stage with us…

With the title, we had to decide this before we’d even made the show due to marketing deadlines! We had just started devising the show in our first R&D process (during the Made in Bristol theatre-making course at Bristol Old Vic we did together). At this stage, we had the basic premise of our show: Inside a house teetering on an eroding cliff edge, everyone parties while impending catastrophe lingers (literally) at its door. The title FREAK OUT! encapsulated this premise perfectly – both a homage to the iconic disco track ‘Le Freak’ by CHIC and a reflection of the characters’ descent into panic about their dire situation. 

Coin Toss Collective have a “non-hierarchical” approach to devising theatre – what brought you all together to focus on the climate crisis?

SOPHIA: In the initial R&D process, we all brought in different stimuli which inspired us at the time; one of those was a podcast episode ‘Apocalypse Creep’ by This American Life. In the episode we heard about a woman called Jane from a coastal community in Pacifica, California who woke up one morning and her back garden had been swept away with the cliff edge. What intrigued us most about this story was that two weeks earlier she had held an El Niño party. An El Niño year is when the storms are especially strong, having a knock-on effect, causing stronger currents and in theory making it more likely to tear away at the cliffs. Nevertheless, at the El Niño party and in the spirit of ‘theory rarely translates into practice’, the neighbours dressed up mockingly in floatation devices, sporting life jackets, rubber ducks and inflatable rings. We wanted to further explore the attitude of ‘it happens, but it won’t happen to me’, climate deniers, and the importance of community in the face of crisis.

What kind of response does FREAK OUT! offer to the climate crisis?

WERONIKA: We observed a disconnect between the story of climate change in the UK, which frames it as a concerning but not urgent issue, and the reality of it. Why aren’t we freaking out? Why aren’t we discussing how the UK needs to adapt to this challenge? Every crisis is, in part, a storytelling crisis. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing the reality of the situation. Climate change is a global issue already manifesting locally, and just like in other places in the world, those at the forefront of it are already on society’s periphery. We want to bring urgency to the conversation about climate change in the UK and advocate for more radical action and timely adaptation.  

FREAK OUT! confronts the audience with the knowledge that soon, we will all be in the same situation as the residents of Portsford unless we get to work and demand change, and here in the UK, we do have the opportunity to do that! We are one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases so when in the show we speak about communities within the UK asking for compensation, we hope the audience will transpose the conversation around loss and damage into a global context. 

Could you tell us a bit about why having a UK setting was important to you?

SOPHIA: A quick Google search and you can find out that the UK has one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe. It was important for us to localise our play to the UK because telling the story of coastal erosion happening in the States didn’t feel like our story to tell and less relevant to UK audiences. The effect of the climate catastrophe is not just something that happens to other countries and if audiences could leave the show thinking about how it also affects their neighbour, then perhaps it would inspire some urgency.

This production has run twice now, once at Bristol Old Vic and once at VA