I sat down with Courtney Bassett of Half-Trick Theatre to talk about their new show Waiting For Wonka (2-5 July at Augustine United Church Studio) and their upcoming Edinburgh Fringe Show The Faustus Project.
Salvador Kent: Thanks for joining me! Could you tell me about Half-Trick?
Courtney Bassett: We started in Edinburgh, so it’s a combination of some creatives that all knew each other. We all moved over together in 2023 during Edinburgh Fringe and we started Half Trick here in Scotland. The four key members are myself, Caden Scott, Alex Medland, and James Jennifer Wright. But we have had lots of other people that work with us regularly. And the four of us, it is a little bit of a hive-mind. I think we just wanted to do things that we felt like we weren’t allowed to do. That was the ethos. Like Waiting for Wonka, it was like, well we can’t do it, it’s a parody. Or The Faustus Project, it’s too risky, it’s too edgy. In New Zealand, there is less of an emerging space, you are either in an amateur space or you are a paid professional, and what we have really loved about making theatre in Scotland is that the emerging artist space is so supportive. Considering that as a theatre company, we didn’t exist until about a year ago, the amount of work we’ve been able to put on and the support we’ve seen is so heartening.
Salvador: Could you tell me about your latest show, Waiting for Wonka?
Courtney: Waiting for Wonka originally came from me rewatching the 1971 ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ and resonating with what I saw as Veruca Salt’s tragic arc. It is a tired joke to say, “Oh isn’t Wonka creepy”, but there is truly something here about looking back at a moment in your childhood and realising it is way darker than you initially thought. I kept talking about this idea with my partner and co-writer on this project, Caden Scott. First, we made adult versions of all the characters in Sims and put them in a house in the game. We started to make them interact, and came up with all of these different scenarios. If you take it very seriously that a girl under the age of ten got inflated like a blueberry then had all the juices popped out of her (which happens to Violet) that is pure body horror, pure trauma. Which, in another way, is very funny. We went through the five characters and thought about what would the effects on them be as young adults grappling with that. We are inspired by things like ‘Succession’, a family of misfits taking down a dynasty. The title is also playing with ‘Waiting for Godot’. I would also say the play is a satire of kitchen sink dramas. What if a serious family drama play was about the children from Willy Wonka? Also, this play is kind of a rejection of what I think Roald Dahl wants you to feel with the book: the whole “stupid fat kid”, “stupid rich kid”, “stupid kid watching TV”, “I’m a smart kid reading books!”. And most bizarrely of all “stupid kid chewing bubblegum” – chewing gum is not a sin! All these things Dahl arbitrarily decided are annoying or bad. Fine – they might be. But do these children deserve these terrible punishments for such minor crimes? I want to reject the idea that if you are a very good child then you will win. I think there is something political, almost conservative in that idea of “oh, he rots his brain away on television, therefore he is a nasty boy”. That is a very uncomplicated reductive argument.
Salvador: I feel that when you go into a theatre, there is a liveness to it – I do not want to watch something I can see in a cinema. This play feels like that resonates with that – but what about the formal choices makes it have that liveness?
Courtney: The reason this must be lively is because it is a realisation of Fanfiction on stage. And Fanfiction (I’m really getting on my high horse here) is innately subversive. Fanfiction is queer before anything else is. Fanfiction will take Star Trek and say actually it is about gender queer aliens in love. Fanfiction is a space where you can take these heteronormative, or any traditional ideas we have about characters, and subvert them, in a way big budget TV and movies never will. And I feel the same about theatre, we’re more likely to be able to stage things that are subversive, interesting, that are not reliant on funding or boards or production companies saying “yes”. Especially in the emerging artist space. Realising it live is evoking that feeling of play-pretend – we’re role-playing these characters, we’re saying what if these characters had a different story, a different vibe. When you think about Wonka it’s such a visual overload, and I wanted to evoke the cinema language of visual overload, putting it into this like dinky little set, as if to say – now it is a kitchen sink play, we have taken this big commercial concept, and now they are just in a flat talking about their feelings. But in order to sell the idea that these characters are in their house talking about their feelings, it has to still feel like they are in the world of Wonka.
Salvador: This idea of evoking the feeling of play-pretend, is that something you have played with in the rehearsal room?
Courtney: Everybody in the cast completely gets the tone because they take it so seriously, but it is also so hard for us to get through a rehearsal without corpsing! In the early stages we did a lot of sitting around in a circle. The actors did a lot of improvisations as their characters, hot seating. But also they got to the point where they could comfortably just sit in a circle and share things. It was very ‘The Breakfast Club’. Just have the actors in the room talking about their Wonka trauma, which is also a little bit what the play is like. So yeah, it is evoking that play-pretend, role-play, Fanfiction vibe for me, which is huge because that’s a lot of what inspired me creatively when I was younger.
Salvador: How would you describe your personal relationship between fanfiction and theatre?
Courtney: I think it is an under-appreciated art form. This comes up with The Faustus Project for me. People would describe Waiting for Wonka as Fanfiction, but they wouldn’t describe The Faustus Project as Fanfiction. Sure. I wouldn’t describe The Faustus Project as Fanfiction, but it is. It is Fanfiction of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but when you take something that’s seen as literary, suddenly that’s like an adaptation or an interpretation. You take something that’s seen as lowbrow art, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and it’s Fanfiction. But like, what is Fanfiction?
Salvador: Does this mean the methodology in the same rehearsal room is the same at its core?
Courtney: Well I think with Faustus it’s so different because Caden Scott (the other artistic director of Half Trick), is directing The Faustus Project and I’m directing Waiting for Wonka. So I’m not in charge of the room in The Faustus Project, I’m one of the cast members. And so that’s kind of nice, because it means I feel like I get to play and offer more rather than delegate. I’d say, I think Waiting for Wonka has a more kind of sweet, loving approach to its characters, whereas The Faustus Project is theatrical torture. It is a little bit more nasty, like challenging. And I think, because, yes, the whole conceit with The Faustus Project, for those who don’t know, being that we have a guest actor in every night who plays Dr. Faustus, who’s never rehearsed with the cast, hasn’t met most of us, they are probably promoting their own Fringe show, so that’s usually how it works. We introduce the show they’re doing for the rest of the month, and then they proceed to play Dr. Faustus with the script in hand, but all the other lines in the script are blacked out and they don’t know who we’re playing and we’re all off-book and meticulously rehearsed. But it’s kind of like a series of theatrical games. We are doing a very cut-down version of Christopher Marlowe’s script but it’s also all about them as an actor selling their soul for a chance in the spotlight. So it’s like a kind of meta-fitter. It’s operating on both levels. They’re playing Dr. Faustus, who is selling their soul, and also they, the actor, are selling their soul. And it’s like, how far will you go? I’d say the process around Waiting for Wonka has been a lot more warm and affectionate, whereas when we’re brainstorming in The Faustus Project. Every time we come back to this play (because this is the third time we’ve done it now), we usually end up having like a big board where we write up all the things that are okay to do to people and things that are never ever going to be okay. Usually “never ever going to be okay” is like “kill them” and okay is like “say hello”. Everything in the middle we’re trying to push it as far as we can towards not okay, while still being something that they sign off to. And I think that’s kind of what The Faustus Project is about: how far will you go, and what is ethical art? So, The Faustus Project is kind of a cruller, but that being said, both shows are about abuse of power.
The Faustus Project will be back at Edinburgh Fringe 2025. Tickets: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/the-faustus-project
Image courtesy of Half Trick Theatre.