Out of this world

Multi-award-winning Scottish theatre company Grid Iron’s latest immersive production will take Festival visitors well beyond the melee of central Edinburgh – to another world, in fact. Large-scale promenade piece Leaving Planet Earth will cast audiences as the final migrants to New Earth, in a future where we have exhausted our homeworld’s resources.

In reality, New Earth is the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena, located on the city’s outskirts. When I speak to co-writers and directors Catrin Evans and Lewis Hetherington in a snatched half-hour off from planning the show, they stress the appropriately otherworldly beauty of this huge glass and steel structure.

“The site has really informed the story’s shape,” says Hetherington. “There are these remarkable, characterful spaces throughout, which we’ve been able to use so naturally in scenes that it almost feels alive.”

Evans agrees. “It’s a place built with vision and you want to make a show that respects that.” As soon as she walked in, “I knew we were on New Earth.”

The seeds for the piece were planted when freelance theatre-maker Evans read a Guardian article by environmentalist George Monbiot positing the terrifying notion of Earth as the ultimate disposable commodity. Evans took this “really provocative image” to Grid Iron—who’d invited her to pitch ideas—as an interesting starting point for telling a story. “I just didn’t know what that story was going to be.”

The idea of creating an immersive experience centred on a new world emerged collaboratively when Evans invited playwright Hetherington onboard. The pair had been “chatting a lot about potential projects,” and Hetherington—a sci-fi fan—was excited by the challenge of making a theatrical reality from the idea of “screwing up the Earth and throwing it away.”

Some types of sci-fi storytelling were never going to work. “One of the archetypal images of a sci-fi film is some amazing spacecraft hovering in space, which is much harder to do in theatre!” Hetherington laughs. Instead, the pair focused on telling an epic, sci-fi-inspired narrative through a human lens, exploring how various settlers on New Earth are coping.

And no single strand dominates. For example, while Vela—the architect of New Earth—is an important character, her's is just one of several voices. “We realised quite quickly that we weren’t interested in telling just one story,” Evans says. “I guess the overall arc is: how do we construct a new society? Which ideas, philosophies and politics do we bring with us? What are the things we can’t leave behind?”

And what should audiences expect from this kaleidoscopic vision? “The key thing is that they will be new arrivals,” Evans teases. “And Vela’s specialism is making sure that people are emotionally and psychologically prepped to live in this new society. So we’ll be looking at how they handle things. And then we’ll tell them some stories...”

Hetherington adds: “Hopefully people will have real fun piecing together all of the different experiences that make up the collage the show is painting.”

Since staging their adaptation of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber beneath the Royal Mile at the 1997 Fringe, Grid Iron have won countless awards and are recognised as one of the foremost pioneers of site-specific theatre. This form has exploded in popularity in recent years, with companies like Punchdrunk and dreamspeakthink cropping up everywhere from abandoned warehouses to disused supermarkets.

Evans attributes Grid Iron’s continued success in this increasingly crowded marketplace to the fact that they’re very good at casting the audience. "Here, just by being clear about what we’re asking of people in terms of the specific role they’re playing in this fictional world, they’re much more likely to go on the journey with us.”

Edinburgh-based Grid Iron have performed globally but their native roots run deep. They have returned regularly to the Fringe, premiering work embedded with Scottish references. Even the interstellar voyage of Leaving Planet Earth starts with an Edinburgh-based research institute, the fictional Galactic Futures Organisation.

Hetherington speaks glowingly about Grid Iron’s “fantastic reputation” at the Fringe: “It’s so exciting for us to be part of that.” But what he and Evans most love about the company is that “they’re very good at getting in people who wouldn’t usually come to the theatre. Any fear of curtains and old velvet seats is immediately done away with.”

Evans and Hetherington hope that Leaving Planet Earth will be just as liberating. “The majority of the content is the same but people will see it in a different order depending on where they are,” Hetherington says. “What’s amazing about a big site is that you become your own editor – your eye can go wherever you want."

And, adds Evans, “as much as we want to grapple with really serious stuff, we’re also making an offer to the audience – let’s go on adventure.”