Slaying the Midlife Myth: Game of Crones | A&E Comedy | An Interview

I recently sat down with the incredible Abigail Dooley and Emma Edwards—better known as the fiercely funny A&E Comedy at the Albany Theatre in Coventry.

We are talking all about their epic new touring show, Game of Crones. These two are absolute warriors of the stage, tackling the so-called 'invisible wasteland' of midlife with fearless buffoonery and unapologetic brilliance!

But this interview isn't just about the laughs; we are diving deep into the business of being funny. We chat about exactly how they formed their comedy duo, the realities of producing and marketing your own work, and they share some absolute gold-dust advice for anyone looking to break into the comedy scene.

Whether you are a creative looking for industry tips, or just a strong woman looking for fierce allies who truly represent the 'third age', you are going to love this chat.

So, sharpen your swords, pour yourself a goblet of Rioja, and hit play!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONhu-KJdZqM

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Ruth and I'm the Arts Business.

I'm here with the fabulous cast of Game of Crones and creators, Abigail and Emma, and I'm going to ask you a few questions about how the show came to be, how you two came to be together, and just find out a little bit more about it, if that's okay? Yeah. So, how did you both meet and what inspired you to start creating? Well. Well.

In the 1800s? Yes, back in the 1800s. No, we both had quite a similar career paths up until before we met. We both worked for similar companies, came from a background of clowning, masked work.

We both had very similar sort of trajectories, but never actually met, but had lots of mutual friends in common. And then eventually you were directing a show. Yes, okay, Emma ran a children's theatre company with masks, and I came through some friends, contacts, to direct it.

So that's when we first met, back in 2010, something like that. 2010, I think, yeah. Nice.

And then we realised that we had a lot in common in terms of our, like, obsession with comedy. Excellent. And started doing some script writing courses, and started writing some scripts for other people together, and ended up writing sitcom, and that got optioned.

And we were like, this is what we're going to be, writers. And then after decades of, or no, years of sort of trying, banging on producers' doors, trying to get things commissioned, we thought, why don't we just make a show that we do? Yes, I think the problem we were finding was, as you see this evening with our work, it's unusual for women of a certain age to write and perform a kind of surreal comedy. So while we were trying to present scripts with that in, people were kind of confused.

I think, what is this? How does this work? So we thought, well, the best way to do that is actually get back into theatre and do it again. And I hadn't performed for about 20 years. Emma had kept going.

So it was sort of new territory for us, wasn't it, going back? But I think it felt really good to take a bit of power back, really, rather than pitching things all the time and waiting for somebody to say yes. And all those choices being made by someone else to go, well, we're just going to make it anyway. So it felt great to actually just make something, put it on.

We didn't know what the reception would be. But it turned out to be pretty overwhelmingly great that there was a clear kind of gap in the market for comedy that was about something that had a bit of depth to it, a bit of meaning, but that was still kind of stupid, surreal, you know, Vic and Bob, Mighty Boosh type style. Yeah.

And that was the show that has now evolved. That was Enter the Dragons in 2018, and that has now evolved and we've remounted it as Game of Thrones. Oh, nice.

So it's an evolution of your last show rather than being a sequel. Yes. I mean, we've done a few shows in between, but it was our very first show, Enter the Dragons, and we were very new at it and it didn't really get the kind of... We hadn't built an audience yet.

So we only had a very short outing with it, but we always felt it was a very strong show. So, yeah, coming back to it now, it's great because we've learned a lot through three other shows. And now, yeah, it's a continuation.

I mean, we're obviously going through stuff that's slightly different from 10 years ago, but at the same time, things are still really relevant. Great. And how does your two partnership work together? Do you write together in the same place? Do you produce everything yourselves? Who does the making of the fabulous props? All of that.

Well, we've got an amazing team of people that we work with, that we collaborate with. In terms of writing, we are in a room together. We move around, we have big pieces of paper, we brainstorm ideas and we dance around and we write ideas and then we drill down into things.

And then we do quite a lot of careful writing on our own. And then we work with some brilliant collaborators on other elements of the show. Nice.

And how do you divide sort of day-to-day, tour-running activities between the two of you? Uh, we try to divvy it up. Emma's brilliant on socials, I'm not so good. So Emma takes a lot of that on, which I'm really grateful about because I don't particularly enjoy that part of it.

Did you make your trailer? We made that together. We did make that. It's really good.

I really enjoyed it. Pretty lo-fi, lo-fi IT skills. But I think that's part of the aesthetic of the show.

Nice. Yeah, it's very much. We've been ambitious with the tech and we don't always put it off, as you'll see.

That's part of the narrative. Yeah, so we do, and we try to, yeah, we sort of try to sort of go do as much as we can, 50-50. It depends.

If Emma works quite a lot as well, I'm teaching, doing other things. So I'll try and pick up the slack. No, it's pretty half and half.

I think so, yeah. We also have a producer on board. Great.

Which we didn't have before. So he's great. And he deals with a lot of things like funding, sort of communication with venues and touring booking.

Yeah, he does a lot of the contracting. And that's taken a lot of work. Yeah, that's amazing.

And we just get in the van, load the van. We've got an amazing technician who does all the technical stuff. We load the van.

We unpack the van. We do all the other things in between. We bring bags to boardroom.

But we also, we've got, on this show, we've got quite a big team, creative team. We've got Tom Penn, who's a choreographer, who's written... I'm not a choreographer. Musician.

Composer. He's written loads of original music. We've got a choreographer who's done some amazing bits.

Patricia Langer. Filmmaker. Filmmaker.

Rafa Lambrakis Haddad. And the costumes. Jess Eaton, who made our costumes, which are quite spectacular.

They are. I mean, these are incredible. Believe it or not, it's not just what we relax in.

I mean, you could. We could. Probably will.

Could you make a wig where we look like we've been living in the forest? Oh look, there's a bird's nest in it as well. That's amazing. She's got an amazing imagination and we just sort of throw crazy ideas at her and she turns up.

Brilliant. That's what you need. Have you two had any sort of, did you train at all or did you go through educational, arts, creative courses? Yes, slightly different, but then some of the same.

So I went to drama school, so I had to do 15 drama school to do a very sensible acting course, degree course. And from there I did some very straight theatre and then realised it was not really for me. So then I, someone suggested training with the clown guru who's just died, Philip Gollier, so he's quite well known for comedy and clown and bouffant.

So I did some courses with him and then that led me on to doing mass work with a company called Trestle Theatre Company and working with other companies in that similar alternative physical theatre. I mean, Trestle Theatre Company are the mass company in the UK, aren't they? Yes. Yeah.

You performed with them for years, didn't you? Yeah, in Trestle, yes. So I worked with Trestle and some other physical theatre companies. I've probably seen you before then, I'm just not realising.

And I did a combined arts course, I came from a more visual arts background, I went to art college and then I did a course which combined art and drama and dance and all sorts of different things. And then I also went to go with Philip Gollier and that's where everything changed. Yeah, both of us independently, we found something that was like, this is, this is, we're idiots, really.

Yeah, yeah, it definitely tapped into, yeah. Amazing. So, you've answered that already, so I'll skip on to the next one.

From a business standpoint, I mean, now you've got a producer, this might be more about what he does, but do you market to a specific kind of audience? Or have you found that you wanted to do that at the start and actually it's a completely different audience to what you thought, like who's coming to see the show? Yeah, I think we, obviously our demographic is women of a certain, of maturity, our age, and that's obviously the work we make and who we are. Naturally, we are promoting and attracting that sort of audience, but we have, and we are definitely quite a broad demographic now. I think because of the clowning, the comedy element, we've got quite a lot of younger followers now and people who are actually, and also a lot of our work, though, it is from us, we try to make it as universal, as broad as possible.

So, though this show is about the protagonist is a woman of a certain age ageing and dealing with that, there also is a universal message about just transition, ageing, going from one thing to the next. And I think in that way, it broadens our audience, doesn't it? Yeah, I think so. And I think, although this show is about that subject matter, our other show, Witch Hunt, was more broadly about using witchcraft to take down the patriarchy, which is fairly universal.

And then we did a show called Do All The Things, which was very much about, you know, really suitable for everyone, really broad appeal, very interactive. It was just about joy and about having permission to play and giving adults, in particular, an opportunity to sort of play and connect in a way that often people don't. So, I think we've tried to make sure that it is broad.

And I think that audience that we've picked up through Witch Hunt and Do All The Things are now going to come and see this show. And yeah, like Abigail said, we're all ageing. Yes.

All the time. Even right now. By the second.

Tell me about your marketing channels. You use traditional methods as well as your online focus, and you're on Instagram. And is that, are you on any other social networks we should know about? X, but we don't tend to do it.

Yeah, I don't like it. I deleted my personal X, but we've still got it because it's there. But we never really use it.

Yeah, just Instagram really. Yeah, that's mainly it. And for this particular tour, we've also got a marketing publicity person working with us, Molly, which is very helpful because it is quite time consuming.

And it's just nice having somebody constantly on that. Is it the first time you've had someone do your PR? No, we've done PR at different points, mainly for things like Edinburgh, bigger events where it's more intense focus. Yeah, I think Edinburgh, it's crucial, really, because it's such a lot of stuff to cut through, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You don't want to spend your entire time firing TikTok. No, no. No, exactly.

We should do more TikTok or YouTube kind of stuff. TikTok, you'll find you grow a lot better organically on TikTok because it's a relatively new platform. So if you post consistently on it, you will get really good traction on it.

So for the past sort of three weeks, I've been trying to put out a video a day and I started with views around 200 and even now I'm hitting like a thousand and it's just because I'm posting every day. I think that's where we need to, if we did it, we would have to commit to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's been consistent, isn't it? And that's exhausting. Yeah, yeah, it is. Of our skill sets.

Yeah, yeah. Or want. Or want.

It's not really where, I guess it's not really where we want to put our creativity. No, fair. I think we totally recognise that that's a really valuable thing to do if you want to build followers, but also I think you build followers that are not necessarily going to come and see your show because they could be anywhere in the world.

It's not, I'm not sure how much it translates into audiences. I'm not sure how much TikTok would. I think Instagram more so.

And I think it's about consistency rather than amount. So if you start posting once every two weeks and that's what you keep on going, that the algorithms will learn that that's how often you post. Whereas if you post like 20 times in a month and then not again for six months, that's when it will stop.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've sort of experienced a bit of it, so yeah. Yeah, yeah.

How have you funded this show and how much would it take to put something like this on the road? You do not have to answer if you don't want to. Well, how long's a piece of string, really? We have been very fortunate to be successful with Ace Art Category. Amazing.

For the last, all of our shows, actually. Yeah, we've had quite a few. We've been really very fortunate.

Do you write the applications yourself? No. Our producer, Darren, he does his job. That's his job.

And for anyone attempting it, if you're going to spend money anywhere, I would definitely put it, give that money to someone who really knows how to manage that because there is a certain language and certain way of doing it. So top tip, yes, fine. Throw your money at someone who knows how to make an application.

So, yeah, how much? Well, we've done, it varies, really, you know. The first incarnation of this show we made on, I think it was like 15,000. 15,000, I think, yeah.

Which was, yeah, everything made out of sort of thin bags and gaffer tapes. Yeah. And it's really nice to revisit it with a bigger budget.

It's not astronomical, but it's, yeah, it's allowed us to have this elevated perspective that we really wanted. And do you work on box office splits with venues or do you hire venues or is it different depending on where you are? Yeah, it slightly varies, doesn't it? It's usually box office split against a guarantee. Yeah.

Great. And finally, the long game, where do you want to take this? Are you looking to get your work options so you're getting more stuff on TV or are you looking to release your scripts, copyright, or do you just want to carry on making stuff together or a bit of everything? I think for this show particularly, I mean, we've been kind of at a sort of small scale level of theatre for most of these shows that we've done, which has suited us and it's brilliant. It's been really good learning curve.

But I think we're being a bit more ambitious with this and we've got more technicality connected with it, with the idea of possibly it going mid-scale, possibly going into London. So it's sort of, we're trying to elevate our work and our, yeah, I think for this definitely. Yeah, that is what was kind of conscious decision of making this show look like it could be on a bigger stage.

And it is, we are on bigger stages. I mean, not here, this is back to our kind of fringe roots, but we are playing bigger venues and we want to look how it can really kind of expand. And alongside that script writing, we've sort of parked that bit while we've been making this show, but we've got, you know, we've still got treatments for things that we're putting out there, here, there and everywhere.

I mean, there's possibilities that we've got actually films and TV versions of this show, a kind of version of what that could be. So we've already done that. And so we sort of, yeah, as Emma said, we've sort of paralysed, both of them going along at the same time, trying to feed one to feed the other.

Yeah, we've introduced this, well, we've lost language today. Don't worry about it. I do apologise.

We've invited producers and agents to come and see us this time, which they will. So hopefully again, that will elevate us. Where are you two based? We're Brighton.

Brighton, very nice. And if you could give one piece of advice to someone who wants to take a show out on the road, other than definitely hire someone to write your grant applications, what would it be? Don't do it. One piece, gosh.

Or multiple, you're not restricted. I think I would say, and I know that you'll agree with this, probably will Abigail, I think do make the show that you want to see. That's what we did with Enter the Dragons.

That's why we made it, because we were not seeing the shows that we want to see. And have an authentic voice. Think, what do I want to say? And how do I want to say it? And be true to that.

And not think, I've got to please, X, Y, Z. Just make the thing you want to see. Nice. Yeah.

And I think to make your work really noticeable, spend time with the craft of it. Don't rush yourself and go, okay, I've got an idea and I'm just going to take it to Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an extremely expensive, hard place to go.

So you have to take the best work. And I think with a lot of young companies, we work with a lot of young people and young companies. I think the big message for them is, make sure you really are on top of your craft.

And I say that from performance to writing to aesthetics. You don't have to spend huge amounts of money, but don't just come on stage with a plastic bag full of a couple of props that you don't use. So it's just making sure that you really have that.

Yeah, on the word, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. And keep evolving, keep writing. Even every day, we're like, what about trying a new joke? Work at it.

It takes work to make it really good. Keep honing. Yeah.

But I think there's a first point that Emma says, if it's a work that you feel passionate about and you really feel that this is an important message or messages, then that will help you keep going when it's hard, because you really believe in something. And then your audience equally will have that passion and belief as well. Yeah.

And if you're feeling it, it's like someone else's. Yeah, absolutely. And finally, where can we find you? You can pause and get a poster because if you can't read everything off the top of your head.

Unless you do know every venue you're going to off the top of your head, in which case. Oh no, that, no. Hold on, I can probably show you.

Yeah, we can give you a, we can put that here. Touring app. We will be running.

You can, yeah, you can see us in these places. Great. Jackson's Lane.

Oh, Jackson's Lane. Jackson's Lane next Friday. London.

Bath, Rondo, Exeter Phoenix, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Colchester, Doncaster, Edinburgh, Epsom. And finally, Stanley Arts Croydon. Check out our London ones.

Yeah. On our Instagram, there's a link tree. And what's your Instagram? It is at comedy underscore AE.

Great. Thank you very much. Great pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you. That was really good.