King Prince Charles wishes everyone good luck probably.

 Although I'd seen and shared photos, I had no idea when I wrote this post back back in 2022, that actual footage might exist of Charles' career at Footlights. Not a hope. But here it is. And, while not a fake, the King's material does share Ai's hallmark of not remotely understanding what a joke is, but prolifically turning something out anyway. As I head off now back to Square On,e to join the thousands who have faced the Unfightable Unknown of a first night Doing Edinburgh, all previous plaudits potentially worthless – show starts in an hour, TICKETS HERE – may we all find comfort today in the following baffled silence...

 

 I wonder if we could get him to revisit his bagpipe bit.

Alright, If Immersed (Backtracking in Edinburgh)

 

First video with the Newphone. So maybe badphone wasn't bad after all. Maybe me bad? 

 

 Look! I'm in Edinburgh, and beginning to lose track of how many Jonah Non Grata-related PR assigments I've shared on here, but – as these italics suggest – there's more. I don't think the video above counts, but the influence of Jeremy Hardingham’s brilliant Incarnate – the first site-specific show I ever appeared in back in 1997, and whose route I attempted to retrace last night – only occurred to me in the middle of answering a question about "lo-fi absurdity" for Made in Shoreditch. 

 

 

Exciting new Youtube Ai feature.

 

 Here then is that Q&A in full (although it's a bit weird seeing my speaking-to-a-publication voice on this blog... I'm not sure why. It's all public, innit):

Nearly 20 years after its first London outing, Simon Kane is reviving Jonah Non Grata, a solo show that merges absurdism, hymns, and a heavy dose of holy confusion. This surreal, comic exploration of power, extremism, and meaning feels sharper than ever in 2025. We caught up with Simon Kane to unpack his return to the Fringe, the joy of “failed magic,” and the art of staying baffling.

You’re reviving Jonah Non Grata nearly 20 years after its first London outing. What made you return to this gloriously strange beast now?

It’s tempting to say something glib about the absurdity of religious conflict, but I think what’s most important about the show right now is how baffling it is. Good art can get us talking, but really good art can get us to shut up. There’s a lot to be said for reaching out to people through a piece that defies demographics by not making sense to anyone. But the real answer is, I missed it, and I could now afford it.

The show mixes hymns, failed magic tricks, and audience interaction. How do you choreograph chaos without completely surrendering to it?

Entropy keeps the chaos in balance, and a lot of this show errs on the side of grinding to a halt. I added a line this year: “Waiting is also a way of joining in.” So it’s not really chaos. Also, all that’s just in the first third. There are proper scenes and everything later on. It’s like tapas.

You call it a “clownish mystery play.” What does that mean to you – and how does that genre-bending shape audience expectations?

I guess that description is meant to suggest a shabby, human-scale stab at the unknowable. Mystery Plays were the earliest plays in (sort of) English – Bible stories played with a realism bordering upon absurdity by local Guilds. I think it’s helpful to base an absurd work on a simple story most people already know. Even if they don’t know that’s what they’re watching, something will chime.

This is a solo show, but it feels full of shifting characters and perspectives. How do you maintain that energy and dynamism alone on stage?

I’ve realised a lot of the inspiration for this show came from simply asking, what do I want to do onstage. I know why my character does what they’re doing, and I don’t mind if the audience doesn’t, because as long as I know, it will still be watchable, maybe even more so than if the audience knew. Their curiosity provides the dynamism. That, and the songs help.

Power, extremism, meaning – your themes hit harder in 2025. How have the world’s changes affected your interpretation of Jonah’s story?

Jonah’s look of double denim, bare chin and big sideburns was originally based on me very much not wanting to look like anyone’s idea of a terrorist, and that certainly changed, but I don’t mourn the passing of that prejudice. I was a little worried some themes might seem too glib now, but I’d forgotten how abstract the piece is. Although a personal sequel to Shunt’s Gunpowder-plot-inspired, coincidentally 9/11-adjacent show Dance Bear Dance, it’s not really about terrorism at all. It’s about an abandoned protagonist’s power fantasy, and love is as much a part of that fantasy as obliteration.

What’s it like re-entering the belly of the beast – literally and figuratively – after so long away from this material?

I’m incredibly excited. The body has modes, I guess. I’ve just been writing television sketches for Mitchell and Webb again, and it turns out the last time I did that was in 2010, but it doesn’t feel like that. Jonah was never off the table, let’s put it like that. If you want someone to see your work, and your work’s a show, you have to do it again.

You’ve worked with experimental companies like Shunt. What role does ‘poor theatre’ or lo-fi absurdity play in your creative process today?

Ultimately, all immersive work has to do is acknowledge your shared environment, and that’s cheap as chips. Working with Shunt was a dream come true, inasmuch I’d always wanted to make work that was funny in a way I hadn’t seen things be funny before – because that’s what I grew up loving – and Shunt were deadpan and pithy and wildly creative and wildly ambitious, but of course they ended up with a real budget, and every -fi going, which they used brilliantly. Maybe just as strong then is an earlier influence: a writer, performer, and director a few Shunt artists and I had worked with at Cambridge called Jeremy Hardingham. We did a show with him in 1997 around the streets of Edinburgh called “Incarnate”, based on the Gospels, and interspersed with interviews with Drew Barrymore and sound bites from Reservoir Dogs, which maybe makes it sound awful, but Jeremy’s script was brilliant and beguiling, and his no-budget, Pop Absurdist pilfering was a huge influence on Jonah. He never liked the title The Empty Space, because there are no empty spaces – Who plays in an empty space? – but taking everything Peter Brook wrote about “play”, and trying it out with an artist who actually knows how to play… that freedom, that power… making a show up becomes surprisingly easy once you’ve got that under your belt.

How do you want audiences to feel when they leave Jonah Non Grata – confused, comforted, or just covered in metaphorical rice pudding?

Do you know the Monty Python Confuse-A-Cat sketch? Confused only like that cat. Newly mobile. Reset. Maybe even like they want to make their own version. Like they can do anything. I don’t want the venue to hate me though, so no rice pudding. I want people to have had fun, and feel they’ve come through something safely.

 Yes, I now use wet soap instead of rice pudding so I can walk offstage all clean. 

 By the way, do you know the Confuse-A-Cat sketch? It's this:

 

 Some of those answers were informed by six to seven-hundred words I'd written for Broadway World UK – before I'd clocked Jeremy's influence – attempting a brief historical rundown of other great immersive masters like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, the York Realist, me, Shunt, you know, that lot, so here's that...

 Back when Shunt – the theatre collective of which I’m an associate artist – started, we didn’t call it “immersive theatre”, we called it “site-specific” because we took what we were given. One of the reasons for choosing the Gunpowder Plot as an inspiration for DANCE BEAR DANCE back in 2001 was that our venue was a railway arch. No rumbling of a train overhead needed to be ignored now. All attention was rewarded. As the collective grew, and designer Lizzie Clachan could afford to create strange new spaces within found spaces, acknowledgment of every detail of our environment remained crucial. The site was the text.

 Twenty years after first performing the thing most resembling the shape it’s now in, I’m taking my solo show JONAH NON GRATA to Edinburgh. I consider it very much a personal sequel to that work with Shunt but, not wishing to give too much away, the logistics of the piece are those of most other solo shows: me on a stage, and the audience in their seats. Nevertheless, I still think of it as immersive, and here’s a brief, cherry-picked history of what I think immersiveness is, to explain why.

 We could start with the Ancient Greeks. While I’ve not seen the dramas of Sophocles described as immersive (and of course back then, you could easily differentiate actors from spectators because, in a kind of reverse Punchdrunk, the former wore masks) when Oedipus first steps onstage to demand of his subjects through the hole in his face – at some length – if any know who’s responsible for the curse fallen upon his city, every citizen watching would already have known the story of Oedipus, and known it’s him. Their silence wasn’t simply that of an engaged audience; there was that added tension. They were complicit.

 Permission to be complicit is a staple of immersive work. The Mediaeval Mysteries are probably the earliest play-texts in (sort-of) English: short, open-air adaptations of biblical incidents staged by Professional Guilds. In one York Pageant, local “pinners and painters” are seen hunched over a particularly slippery assignment, and it’s only when the job is finished and erected, that the audience can see they were roping and nailing Christ to the Cross. The author of this piece is known simply as “the York realist”. Realism is also a staple.

 Then there’s the Elizabethans. I’m old enough to have learnt – by which I mean, old enough to have been wrongly taught – that Shakespeare’s actors originally were rubbish, and crudely bellowed their lines because the Globe was an open-air space, with no special lighting to tell you who to look at. “Wrongly” of course, because once Sam Wanamaker had the thing rebuilt, its first actor manager was Mark Rylance, stammering and standing like Stan Laurel wondering what he’d done with his keys, captivating audience after audience with his brilliantly studied vulnerability because, in the open air, they could see he could see them back. It wasn’t just soliloquies that were played out to the audience now. Everything had to be, thought and speech balloons alike. Numerous mob scenes, which had proven such a headache in beautifully lit black boxes regardless of their dimensions, were now a piece of piss at the Globe where the audience was the mob, happy to be whipped up by whatever demagogue stepped up. We didn’t call it “immersive” when the Globe reopened either; that was still a word to be used in opposition to the idea of “traditional” theatre. But the Globe Experiment proved Shakespeare’s plays had been both.

 Then theatre went indoors, and theatrical spaces stopped basing themselves on the courtyards of inns. It became too expensive to light an audience for the duration, and the relationship between performer and spectator couldn’t help but be affected. Over two hundred years later, in Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, the young Konstantin’s awkward rebelliousness is exemplified by his attempt to stage his work in front of a real lake beneath a real moon. Not a realist piece, but a hugely ambitious, abstract poem about the beginning and end of all things, it’s still immersive, albeit fictionally – it’s an attempt to recontextualize his audience’s experience of their environment, like the rumbling of the trains in DANCE BEAR DANCE, or the fleeing green figure in the EXIT sign my reluctant prophet of doom can’t take his eyes off in JONAH NON GRATA.

 If your environment – audience included – is visible, and acknowledged, a show cannot help but be “immersive”. And if it’s not, you might be better off putting whatever you’re doing online, and giving yourself the evening off. “Come and ignore where you are” is still the default tradition when going to see a play. “Or don’t” is all “immersive” really means.

 

 I open tomorrow. My technical rehearsal was Monday, and everyone was lovely but the venue still hadn't been built, so I don't entirely know yet what there won't be to ignore there. But, just to prove my inspiration for Jonah changes every time I'm asked, here to play us out is a Q&A for Hinton magazine in which I add to the mix of Shakespeare, Shunt, Jeremy, Deburau and Chris Ware, not only Sulayman Al-Bassam, but the artist I finally, actually realised probably did inspire me to do a show about Jonah: Alasdair Gray, in his little Canongate Introduction to books of the Bible. These interviews have proved really useful. I hope it's not telling tales to say the one below originally went out under the headline "A Whale of a Mid-Life Crisis" but I do want to broadcast public thanks to my PR and her phones today for handling that narrative. I should probably also state explicitly that – apart from Voidspacezine in the previous post – all the Qs in these Q&As are based purely on a single press release (basically this). Maybe you knew that already. It's a new dynamic for me though. Take it away, liminal beings!

 Rooted in the Book of Jonah but constantly spiralling into stranger territory, this solo performance is silly, profound, and as Kane puts it, “a temporary reprieve from having to be right.”

 You describe Jonah Non Grata as “a clown take on a modern-day mystery play.” Tell us a bit more about this. 

The first show I wrote on my own, rather than co-devising with fun people like Shunt who’d actually studied theatre, was a modern-day prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello, because I really wanted to play Iago, and had also just been to Cairo with Sulayman Al-Bassam’s “Al Hamlet Summit”, so any work seemed fair game. For my second play I wanted to go even further back for inspiration, to the old Mediaeval Mystery plays: rough, semi-realist adaptations of old stories from the Bible. Initially, I considered adapting Jesus’ awkward goodbyes on his return from the dead as described in various Gospels, but then I came across Alasdair Gray’s little Canongate introduction to The Book of Jonah, which he described as “a prose comedy” about “an unwilling prophet” who just “wants God to leave him alone”, and realised this should be the next show, and also that it should be – if not a clown show – at least a show where people felt very comfortable laughing at me.

The show originally debuted nearly 20 years ago. Why revive it now - and what’s changed?

In the show? My eyesight’s got worse, so there’s more audience interaction, as I have to ask people to read stuff out to me. Also, I received a very helpful note, after a late-night performance in 2008, to never let my character lose their temper. The technology that was lying around in 2005 is rarer to source now too, and you can’t just light candles onstage. Bits have been added. Bits have drifted off. But the biggest change is that stupid, evil, wrong people are even more of a problem in the world, and making sense doesn’t seem to be enough to diffuse that. So the show’s absurdity maybe seems more of a radical kindness now – a temporary reprieve from having to be right.

There are hymns, bungled magic tricks, a hotel room, and someone who might be on the moon. What’s your method for weaving such a mix into a cohesive narrative?

Bit by bit. I worry that the more I go into my inspirations for the piece, the more I risk closing off how people might enjoy it. It’s intentionally abstract, but the narrative’s there, in The Book of Jonah. I don’t want audiences to think it’s necessary for them to know that to enjoy the show though. Treat it like a concept album, or a cabaret. Music helps. A lot of the show was made to accompany the music I wanted to put into it. It’s practically a musical.

How does audience interaction influence the tone or outcome of the show if at all?

I’ve realised, in many ways, the show is simply about a character trying to work out how to talk to other people. And those other people are, for the most part, the audience. But because the audience is real, and the character is not, and we know that’s the deal when you come to see a show – a bit like Hamlet’s soliloquies – nothing will ultimately be sorted out. So I think probably the outcome won’t be affected at all. But hopefully watching that failure play out will be something, and maybe even itself feel like a connection.

What’s the strangest or most memorable reaction you’ve had from an audience member?

I think it’s my duty to out-weird the audience, and the richness of an interaction is not in its uniqueness or anecdotal worth, but in the simple fact it’s a reaction. In other words, I don’t remember. Honestly, what I find weirdest is just that so many people get it.

What do you hope to take away from Edinburgh Fringe this year?

Apart from all the stuff you’d expect me to want to take away from performing a show at an International Arts Festival – like love and respect and glory and validation and happy memories and job and book offers – I hope to take away with me some idea of what to do next. I’ve never really made anything as a means to an end, and I have the CV to prove it.

 Jonah Non Grata will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August. For tickets and more information, visit:: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/1076-jonah-non-grata

A Jonah-based mural by Alsadair Gray which I have only just this second found out existed.

The Longest Game

 Here's one of many tangents from a very enjoyable series of conversations I had with Katy Naylor, either side of Katy seeing Jonah Non Grata's Soho show, about that and other participatory projects:

Simon Kane:

Do you know the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game?

 

Voidspace:

Yes, it’s impossible. Notoriously impossible.

Simon Kane:

Once I worked out what that was doing, I thought this is incredible, because it’s actually subverting what a game is. It’s not a role-playing game at all. I think it’s designed to be about creating a very visceral emotional relationship with the technology. The whole point of it is that it’s almost impossible to play.

 

Voidspace:

I had always thought of that as a bug rather than a feature, and just said it was early days, and they hadn’t actually got the hang of difficulty moderating it.

Simon Kane:

It’s about how you deal – it’s a Kobayashi Maru – it’s about how you deal with this unplayable game.

Voidspace:

In the modern Table Top Role-Playing Game world, in the art-game one-pager space, there are games that are deliberately unplayable. There are all sorts of things that are interrogating the form and just being fun and weird. It’s interesting if that was an idea back in the ’80s.

 

Simon Kane:

It has to be. There’s no reason to make it that unplayable. I think it’s signalled by the very first thing you do, where you have to work out how to turn on the light. That’s unnecessary. And you could die. It's horrible. This machine doesn’t understand how a person exists.

Voidspace:

It’s creating in you the sensation of being Arthur Dent, because Arthur Dent hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. Everything is alien, nothing makes sense, everything is baffling. And so that ties into the idea of this work being able to create a sense of exchange, or a sense of communication that can put you into an emotional state of someone else who’s in the world of the piece. 

Tell me some more about Jonah.

... which, if you can bear it, I contine to do HERE.

 

 

 

 And you can try to play the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure for yourself HERE.

 If you want to see me in a dressing gown in Islington, you can come and see Jonah Non Grata's other preview, at the Hen and Chickens this Saturday, by getting tickets for almost a tenner HERE.

 Meanwhile, the PR continues to work, keep taking the PR, with a lovely piece from, of all places, ATV HERE and another from Midlands TV HERE.

 (And here is the final scene of Jack Aldisert's The Manikins (A Work In Progress) – one of many other things Katy and I talked about – as passed to me in a manila envelope when I left the venue. Enlarge for spoilers...)

 

Badphone's Last Stand

 

 To think there was a time I balked at the thought of putting my face on this blog. But here's a little record of my business trip to Praha! for another advert, and catching the mood board for my character at the wardrobe fitting, I see who I have to thank for it...

 

 Thank you, Michael Cera, for giving me a type. 

 In my time off, I revisited many sites still standing from my last trip with Lanna in 2011: the crazy babies crawling up TV Tower – I had forgotten the massive holes in their faces – the weird, giant metronome which replaced the statue of Stalin  – the third AD told me they were thinking of bringing the statue back, but pink this time, of which he approved – and there was, of course, new mad shit too...

   The Giant Prague Museum of Endless Glass Cases of Minerals now boasted other stuff as well! Like a life-sized diorama of "dog-bears" fighting Early Cenozioc ungulents, a complete whale skeleton...

 

 I've played smaller. And those beautiful Šalamoun "Hobbit" illustrations I mentioned last post – here are more...

 There were also harps you could play, suits of armour, skulls, typewriters, and that big, empty room in the video, none of which I remember from 2011, but what I really went to the Museum for of course was the stairs, and they never disappoint...

 

 I also – for the first time – went to the zoo, as recommended, which was huge, its enclosures far less enclosing than those of Regent's Park...

 

 At its centre was a giant statue of Radegast on Mount Radhošť. Not just a guano-soiled wizard played by Sylvester McCoy, Radegast is also it turns out a Slavic Beast God overthrown by Christian missionaries – a deeply disappointing legend. 

 With of all this, Badphone did its best, bless...

 

  But my PR's given me her old phone now, which I didn't take with me, and I think it's time to start taking better pictures.

 

 (Reviewing the video, I notice it's actually shot with a different – and possibly worse – Badphone from the one I took to Bucharest in '22. I fell for Prague just as hard [and indeed for Norwich, when I did Polar Express there {and indeed Croydon, when I went to voice video games there}] but while I did make it to the last two minutes of a band in a cellar playing Watermelon Man, I didn't discover any cool, new music to round off this post with like the Bucharest one.

 So here's Alan.)

 

Sometimes this blog will just be Three Weeks

A pull-quote. I have a pull-quote. 

 

"Jonah Non Grata" is getting another London outing! Next Saturday the nineteenth of July, at 9.30pm up the stairs of that old stalwart of the Edinburgh preview – but a duck-breaking first for me – the Hen and Chickens pub in Islingon. You can get tickets for just (over) a tenner HERE, and if you have any further questions... well, maybe I've answered them below. Maybe not. Maybe you have some questions about my answers. (And if any of them concern the penultimate anwer, I had a lovely meeting about the book on Monday: Apparently, translation rights are where a lot of the money is in childrens' writing. France doesn't like mermaids, because they're sleazy, and – possibly for the same reason – Germany does not like circuses, so take note.)

 

(Also here are some gorgeous, unpublished Hobbit illustrations from Eva Natus-Šalamounová and her husband Jiří, on display HERE, in Prague, which was yesterday. A good week.)

 

 I now have quite a few articles to to-do over the next few days plugging the show, so let's see how many more end up on here. Apologies in advance. Take it away, Caro Moses of THREE WEEKS...

As you know – because we are always talking about it – we like new stuff here at TW Towers. But you know what, we also like stuff that was first really good a few years ago and which is now getting another run. 

And all that relates to the show ‘Jonah Non Grata’, which was originally staged in London back in 2004 to much acclaim, and is going to Edinburgh this year. It’s the work of Simon Kane, an actor and writer who has worked on loads of stuff I love from various media, like ‘Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme’ and ‘Ghosts’. 

‘Jonah Non Grata’ is an absurdist solo show based on the events that befell the biblical Jonah and I wanted to find out more about it. I put some questions to Simon ahead of his upcoming edfringe run. 

Can you start by explaining the premise of ‘Jonah Non Grata’? Who is it about and what story does it tell?

 Inasmuch as it tells a story, it’s the Book Of Jonah, as in Jonah and the whale.

 A very short, possibly satirical shaggy dog story from the Old Testament about a prophet who refuses the call, tries to run away, is swallowed by a large fish sent by God, does what He wants, but is ultimately disappointed by the outcome. 

 The “premise” of the show, however, is that you don’t need to know any of this, but will nevertheless spend an hour not being bored.

 It’s a solo sequel to work I did with a beautiful immersive collective called Shunt, whose greatest review may have come from someone who’d missed the opening forty minutes of one show and so could just enjoy what they saw without worrying about being expected to get it.

 

What themes are explored through the play?

 

 Exactly the same themes as ‘Hamlet’? Yeah, I’m happy with that answer…

 Refusing the call to adventure. The comforts of inaction. Weighing one’s love for people against one’s anger at the world. The very nature of performance. Depression. Loneliness. Christianity. Extremism.

All that. But with songs and a bit where he thinks he’s gone to the moon.

 

How would you describe it in terms of style or genre?

 

 Pop absurdist clowning. A strange world on a tight budget. A church for a churchless faith.

 

What was the inspiration for this piece?

 A lot of friends were making solo shows that weren’t particularly text-based and, although I love writing, I wanted to join in making something more in the clown genre. 

 One of those friends’ shows was about the performer’s Jewishness, “although,” as he said, “I’m not Jewish, because I don’t believe in God”, so I realised that even though I’m an atheist, I’m also, similarly – or at least culturally – a Christian, and that engaging with this big mood might be a good starting point. 

 I’d also been thinking about the very first plays in English: Mysteries, which might read like spoofs but were the work of people who absolutely believed in the biblical reality of what they were performing, and so I thought about writing my own. You know, something “traditional”.

 Initially, I had considered the various accounts of what Jesus got up to after returning from the dead, but then, after reading a note about Jonah in Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’, I opted for this Old Testament alt, as he seemed a good clown.

 I’ve always liked comedies about heroes who run away – I would later make a Radio 4 show called ‘Time Spanner’ about something similar – and a show that plays with thresholds is a good, cheap concept – every venue has doors. 

 As I mentioned, a third influence was the show I’d just been performing with Shunt, ‘Dance Bear Dance’, a clownish immersive piece about the Gunpowder Plot coincidentally devised during the opening months of the War On Terror.

 I wanted to play more both with the idea of making an audience complicit in a religiously motivated act of violence – but with laffs – and the idea of presenting a surreal church service as a basis for audience interaction – it’s nice if the audience has some clue as to what’s expected of them. 

 My work with Shunt in general also made me want to ensure every show was different and surprising, hence the levels of audience participation, as it used to be called. Basically, everything I do in the show is built upon things I’d already enjoyed doing, and had seen people enjoy me doing. 

 

It’s been quite a while since you first performed it – what motivated you to revive it now? 

 I missed it. And I’d landed an advert, so could afford to take it to Edinburgh. The show had never had a proper launch. It was just a thing I did, that people liked.

 But I’m finally now beginning to learn, not only how to make a show, but how to keep it alive, something I’d never known how to do on my own before. 

 Also, I’m seeing less and less stuff like it, and wanted to see if there was still an appetite for this kind of recklessly – if not irresponsibly – personal silliness. I think you can do anything onstage. I hope this show communicates that.

 

Has the show changed at all in the meantime? 

 Barely. I’ve written a few more jokes about the nature of audience interaction to help me get from A to B. And I might not use a real candle any more, but that’s actually funnier. One of the things that’s so exciting to me is how much it still chimes, but how differently.

 

You haven’t brought it to the Fringe before – why not before and why now? 

 See my previous answer! I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know how. And I can now and I know how. But also, I think my confidence in the show has grown.

 There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to make a show about right now, but it turns out Jonah is still that show.

 

Are there any post Fringe plans for the show? 

 Hopes, currently, rather than plans. This is why I’ve got a producer. I very much want to just get it in front of as many people as possible for as long as possible.

 It’s my clown show. But I’m also curious how it works as a play text. Theatrical criticism is still very ‘play’-based.

 

What do you like about the Fringe? What will you get up to in Edinburgh when not performing?

 It’s people making things. I’ll see things. Sometimes I’ll see five things in a day and they’ll form into one big thing in my mind. It’s magic.

So do you have a hit list of other shows you would like to see?

 I like finding out what’s interesting once I’m up there, but I will definitely be seeing ‘Simple Town’, and I will definitely be seeing Neil Frost’s ‘The Door’.

 

What drew you to performing as a career? Was it what you always wanted to do? 

 I could do it. I could hide in plain sight.

 My Dad’s an actor and a writer, but he mainly stayed at home on the typewriter when we were growing up, which was very nice for us.

 His brother, however, my wonderful Uncle Gordon, was a proper jobbing, touring actor, and we loved him, and everyone loved him, and acting professionally seemed a very nice, fun, feasible way to not grow up.

 In that sense, yes, it’s something I always wanted to do.

I have to say that you’ve been involved to a greater or lesser extent with some of my Very Favourite Things. What would you say have been the highlights of your career thus far? 

 

 That’s nice! I don’t really think I have a career, because it’s so often work with friends, but I suspect they’re definitely My Very Favourite Things too, and it’s a broad if not hefty mix.

I think the work with John Finnemore is unique in that it has fans who will be fans until I die. Cunningly, however, it’s all been highlights.

 Even the terrible work has been with brilliant people, and having brilliant people in your life is the very best thing. I’ve only one rule: never ever work with or for the bored.

 

What aims and ambitions do you have for the future? 

 I think I still want to do everything.

 

What’s coming up next for you after this?

 I’ve no idea. The next show? I’ve written a screenplay. I’m writing a book. I guess the next thing – now I seem to have worked out how making a show works – is to work out how all that other stuff works too. 

Simon Kane will perform ‘Jonah Non Grata’ at The Assembly Rooms from 31 Jul – 24 Aug, find the edfringe listing here. 

... But you guys knew that.

Margaret's Fringe. Gilbert's Fridge.

Margaret Cabourn-Smith reflects on her old sketch antics and why you shouldn't use real meat in your shows. You can listen to the full conversation right here! shows.acast.com/out-of-chara... #Comedy #Chat #Podcast #Sketch #Character #VictorianTimes #Liver #Magic #EdFringe

[image or embed]

— Out Of Character (@oocharacterpod.bsky.social) 26 May 2025 at 10:54

 

 As "Jonah" turned from distant credit to looming "to do", I found these and other reminiscences about heading to the Edinburgh Fringe and making "magical worlds... trawling costumes around rooms above pubs" from fellow Finnemoreperson and rising star, Margaret Kaboom-Smith, both inspiring and grounding, and did not in the end use real fish. 

 

 Another reminiscence: Margaret, Carrie, Lawry and I independently tour our production of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "Мы" for ten seconds in 2019

 

 Margaret is often inspiring and grounding, and I happen to have also recorded a (far more meandering) Out of Character with Alex Lynch back in 2022, but never got round to putting it up here, so why not listen to both episodes now, and compare our differing accounts of, say, making Series Nine? (I did not think it might be shit.)

Simultaneously. That's right. Listen to them simultaneously. It's like being in the room with us!

 

 I remember enjoying myself a lot during the recording, and also the punishing heat – so today's actually perfect for a repost – I had just got back from "Bleak Expectations" in Newbury, and had no idea at the time the show would go on to the West End with an almost completely new cast, nor that Series Nine would indeed be the last series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme but that it would continue as a series of annual specials, and I'd certainly no idea I would be writing for Mitchell and Webb again in 2025, which I should definitely write about, I know. But I think that's all the loose ends tied up. Our next Silly Voices Day is Friday.

 

Yet another reminiscence: Mayfly Season, Newbury, 2022. Intense.

 

 Oh! The actor whose name I couldn't remember is James Callis, and Lillian Roth is the actress from "Animal Crackers". And I don't think that sound is me belching and rustling crisps, I think it's feedback. And it's a Newcastle accent Gilbert puts on as Len MacMonotony, not Birmingham, and Engelbert Humperdinck he mentions, not Sacha Distel. In fact, here is some "Gilbert's Fridge". They don't make kids' shows like etc.

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Laser Birds

 

 I've been giving a lot of thought to why the Arrested Development joke above, where Michael finds a bag in the fridge marked 'DEAD DOVE Do Not Eat!' opens it, looks inside, winces, but then says "I don't know what I expected" is so funny (outside of how well it's played and shot), and I think I've got it: People have an unhelpful amount of difficulty processing unexpected information through any medium other than personal experience.

 

  I've also been considering how much I may have overestimated people's desire to communicate with each other in general – or rather, be communicated to – and underestimated how much they might just rather be left to their own opinions, unruffled by information from other people, aliens, or pets. Here are some photographs of a man trying to teach a horse to count: Wilhelm Van Osten, whose work in the 1890's on or with "Clever Hans" spanned a number of moustaches...

 Their story graces the Extra Material of Helen Zaltzman's ever excellent "The Allusionist" podcast, specifically the second of two episodes about science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal's apparently successful attempts to establish more nuanced communication with her cat, Elsie, through an increasingly large number of "button boards" (as shown below). While aware that no experiment ever showed an animal to be dumber than we thought, I initially approached these episodes with scepticism, but by the time I was hearing about a cat forming compound words – attempting to summon a light's reflection on the ceiling by tapping the buttons for "laser" and "bird", say –  I was asking myself, My God, why doesn't every pet owner have one of these?

 

 Source.

 

And it was this question which led me to consider that, maybe, people would just rather not know what other beings are thinking. Does any of this have anything to do with "Jonah Non Grata"? Not really, which is why I'm posting it. You guys deserve a break. For the record though, I feel that that night at Soho turned out to be both beautiful and useful, give hot thanks to everyone who came – including those who had to because they worked there – and am very grateful too to Rich Cline, for his lovely review which you can read HERE, but that's not much of a post, is it.  

 

Poster suggestion subsequently vetoed by PR. "Faces sell more." 

 

I will also just say that in, you know... these times...  while I may be writing to my MP quite a bit, and while I wish every friend of mine engaging with the Equality and Human Rights Commission's oppressive, ignorant, and unnecessary instructions on gender conformity every success in their consultation with MPs and hope to my core their consultation helps... that, as Rich writes in his review: "absurdity keeps us on our toes," and that we should, more generally, remember Michael and the dead dove and stop putting so much faith in the idea that, as long as we make sense, we'll be understood. I wish that were true. But, less dispiritingly, I'm also excited to start reaching out again to people through a work they won't have to understand.

 Here are tickets for Jonah at Edinburgh.

 And here are those episodes: