Creator: Coin Toss Collective
Playing at the Omnibus Theatre’s Edinburgh preview series, Freak Out! has continued to evolve. Previously performed at Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic (2022) VAULT Festival, London (2023) and Camden People’s Theatre (2024) the Toss Coin Collective, a seven-strong ensemble, is attempting to raise awareness of Britain’s crumbling coastlines through physical theatre, dance, clowning, audience participation and multi-media.
Rosie Mullaney, Sophia Oriogun-Williams, Weronika Dwornik, Sol Woodroffe, Ben Notice, Alyssa Thomas, and Claudia Zita Kurucz met at Made in Bristol, a year-long theatre-making residency at the Bristol Old Vic and have since secured Arts Council.
Set in Portsford, a coastal town, Freak Out!, an eclectic piece of collage storytelling, is based on research from the University of East Anglia and includes vox pops and archival footage. Climate change and rising sea levels mean Britain has the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe; back gardens are swept away; houses crash into the sea devastating real lives while most of the country turn a blind eye. A melange of fact and fiction, comedy and tragedy, solemnity, and absurdity, Freak Out! manages to create an entertaining and engaging hour while raising awareness of this national eco-crisis.
The central Freak Out! narrative takes place at a designated Red Zone where residents are offered a paltry sum to upsticks and move somewhere less precarious. The residents all have different relationships with the coastline, from the farmer who’s lived there for generations to the city “tourist” who sets up a pub (sold at a bargain price) at the cliff’s edge.
The visual and kinetic effect of being submerged is expressed in multiple ways. Most memorably, a PhD student and writer, take turns to dunk their heads in buckets of water while discussing the crucial issues in a kind of consciousness-raising foreplay. National denial is powerfully expressed by some lavish disco dancing by Eli (the PhD student) against a background film of extreme weather disasters. The rest of the ensemble watches disdainfully before turning on him like beasts.
Freak Out! sounds an alarm bell without preaching and presses all kinds of sensory and emotional buttons; one minute, the audience laughs, and the next, there is an inward shudder at the sound of the creaking and crashing away of land. The stage at the Omnibus seems too small for this physical performance of seven writhing, undulating, and moving bodies. The set of miniature houses and a lighthouse encircled by a life buoy are a bit lost and seem superfluous with so much else happening. Hopefully, there will be more space for the Coin Toss Collective to spread their word, moves and little houses – at Edinburgh Fringe.
Reviewed on 23 July 2024 and then runs at Edinburgh Fringe, The Pleasance 31 July – 26 August 2024
