We spoke to Callie O'Brien from Elastic Fantastic about the company and their new show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, in a conversation that encompassed the process of writing, queerness and the current trans scene.
If Shallowspace can get people talking about queerness or even just their favourite nerdy media, that’s about the best thing I could hope for
Callie, let’s start with some background on the company and how you got involved.
Scattered between Leeds, Bristol, Brighton and Edinburgh, we’d actually never all been in a room together until the day before our tech rehearsal at last year’s EdFringe. The others – Mike Dorey (director), Jake Mace (producer and writer/performer of our debut show Deeptime Atomic Waste Pleasure Party) and Ronan Gordon (composer) – met at college and were creating historical theatre together way back in 2017, before shifting focus to queer solo storytelling after the pandemic, with hopes of building a semi-professional theatre company.
My own involvement started back in 2022, during my very first Fringe Festival, with a napkin pitch in Surgeons’ Courtyard for a show about nuclear waste and techno music. Sci-fi, synthy, queer? I had to get involved. Cut to three years later and that show – what would become Deeptime – boasts a sellout run at the Prague Fringe and rave reviews (if you’ll pardon the pun).
We really found our niche with Deeptime, and we’re excited to bring more of what we love creating to Edinburgh this summer – deep and novel worldbuilding, immersive multimedia storytelling and visceral queer perspectives.
So let’s move on to this year’s production, Shallowspace Cryotech Feverdream. Why do you think this story should be told now, and what are you hoping will come across to the audience?
Shallowspace is, above everything, a show about queer love. It’s messy, unapologetic, aching, and sometimes painful. But underpinning it all is that undeniable sense of connection. Connection with those who share your lived experience, even if you’ve never met, and connection with your past self, who doesn’t yet have the words to express what they’re feeling.
The queer community is watching our rights and livelihoods be dismantled before our eyes, so there has never been a more important time to shout about our existence than right now. Shallowspace asks how we might preserve humanity’s legacy and, with the way the world is going, what does it mean for a queer person to be the one to tell it?
The show’s main character is August. Who is she, and how has she developed since you started writing the show?
I’ve definitely put a lot of myself into August. Her nerdiness, eccentricities, speaking patterns – all are an artefact of growing up online while coming to terms with her own queerness and neurodivergence. As a trans person, I feel there’s almost a necessity for us to become experts in gender theory, psychology and endocrinology in order to justify our existence.
August definitely uses this mindset as a crux, thinking that her intelligence can get her out of an impossible situation and help her get through to voices that aren’t even listening – if only she knew enough to find the right thing to say.
Since writing the first draft at last year’s Fringe, trans existence in the UK has been under constant interrogation and threat. I’ve definitely felt August’s voice shift over the last few months, and the version you’ll meet is brimming with equal parts yearning and queer rage.
And what about your interest in science fiction – how has that translated into writing the piece?
To me, such a core part of queer youth is that feeling of escapism. Finding that place where you can plug in, submerge yourself in another world, and forget all about real life. Sci-fi media was that for me growing up – the Fallout franchise, Starbound, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Pretty early on in the play, August finds her escapism in the Archive – a digital record of all human history which she’s shepherding through space. This show is a love letter to all those alternate worlds of my childhood, complete with all the blinking lights and technobabble you’d ever need on a journey to the stars.
The show uses multimedia. How have those aspects been integrated into the narrative?
Multimedia has become a big part of the Elastic Fantastic brand – immersive soundscapes, found footage, and ethereal montages. With Shallowspace, we’re being a lot more ambitious in how we’re using audio and projection for scene-setting and storytelling. I’m really excited for it.
Beyond the obvious inspiration of the glitchy, grungy hallmarks of retrofuturism and cyberpunk media (genres which are pretty inherently queer if you’re paying attention), the process of making these weird and wonderful projections is a queering in itself: warping and layering things to a breaking point where all the glitches, noise and digital artefacts become the art. We’re building August’s world from the ground up for our audience – the blinking lights of her habitation capsule, the shifting seas of data she explores, and all her ephemeral frozen dreams.
What are your hopes and ambitions for the Fringe this year?
Last year, I wrote a whole show (this show) while working full-time as a venue technician and working on Deeptime for half the month, so that’s a hard precedent to beat. I track a lot of my Fringe stats – shows seen, 5am bedtimes, trips to Banshee Labyrinth – so writing another show or beating any of those metrics is always a goal.
But beyond that, I want to connect with as many creatives, new faces and old friends, as I can. The people are always what keeps me coming back to the Fringe; the opportunity to experience art and theatre and music together is what makes this chaotic, exhausting month worth every minute. If Shallowspace can bring people closer together – get people connecting and talking about queerness or identity or even just their favourite nerdy media – that’s about the best thing I could hope for.
And your hopes and ambitions for the future?
I had an absolute blast following Deeptime to the Dundee and Prague Fringes after our Edinburgh run last year, and I’d love to see Shallowspace make a similar pilgrimage, with maybe a few more stops along the way!
After that, this definitely isn’t the only play I’ll write – I’d love to explore the potential futures of the planet August left behind: dreams of digitised consciousness and dystopian cityscapes, or utter devastated wasteland inspired by my first sci-fi loves of Fallout and Borderlands. Something a little Mad Max-y, maybe.
