Vault Festival, Brighton Fringe,
& Edinburgh Fringe
2016
Hosted by the love-child of Sandi Toksvig and Frank N. Furter, STAMP is a cheeky, extreme and challenging live art gameshow where you make the rules.
A joyous, irreverent interactive theatre experience that breaks the mould for creating art about gender, brushing aside sincerity and instead embracing chaos, humour and heckling. Stamp takes it’s inspiration from the worlds of cabaret and television game shows, so the audience are very important and they play with us to tell the story.
Co-Created by Helen White, Simon Magnus and Jessica Cheetham
ARTISTIC TEAM
Performers: Helen White, Jessica Cheetham, Simon Magnus
Sound Designer: Laura Bowler
Set design: Kelly Edwards
Lighting design: Michael Corcoran
Dramaturgy: Simon Magnus
Director: Jessica Cheetham
Producer: Daisy Hale
STAMP is a ridiculous, riotous ripping up of the rule book for examining gender binaries. Someone should really tell them that shows seeking to question the nature of men and women and then educate us on our own social constructs need to be a lot angrier, more self-satisfied and duller. This is none of that.“ – Broadway Baby
Spun Glass Theatre were originally broadly looking at gender and sexuality in performances, and how those themes relate to individual performers. A Midsummer Night’s Dream provided some narrative inspiration, and we became increasingly interested in popular culture and how gender stereotypes are disseminated through television and the media. The first showcase performance at The Marlborough Theatre comprised of snippets of material ideas. The snippet stuck and blossomed into Stamp, an extreme masculinity game show segment where performers had to compete – downing beer and eating chillies while putting together flat-pack furniture.
Stamp is essentially an extension of that segment into a full show, asking what it means to be masculine or feminine today, telling stories in a competitive game show set up. Our host Helen White has a great sense of humour and command of the show, really guiding the audience’s experience. Our aims with the show are to attract a wide range of audience members, especially young people to see how they play the game and to entertain them. Audiences always leave commenting on how fun the experience of taking part is.
"One of the best experiences of my life". - WHM