DYSNEY DISFUNCTION To Debut At Edinburgh Fringe

Malcolm Bradbury Award winner Michelle Sewell 's new show Dysney Disfunction premieres at this years Years Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It runs at Assembly Rooms, Front Room, George St (Venue 20) from 2-25 August (not 14).

In Brexit Britain happily ever after (and UK residency) is just a marriage visa away. But Australian Alice's visa expires today and she's only got Primark flats for glass slippers, an Oyster card for a pumpkin coach and a prince who won't twerk.

Alice has always thought that love would be her fairytale. Yet now, en route to the airport, she waits forlornly at a London Underground station for her Prince Charming to realise his love and rescue her with a marriage proposal. Without a visa she faces a forced return to a country she doesn't call home anymore.

As she debates the nature of love itself, whether love changes people and whether childhood stories have a place in the adult world, will Alice save herself or keep waiting for her Prince?

Are they just from the pages of Grimm and Disney films or do princesses and fairytales live on in the modern world? Do we create our modern versions via social media? As an apolitical Daily Mail reader who considers herself to be a feminist, is Alice that different to an American actress who can marry a real-life prince and gain the right to remain in the country?

Dysney Disfunction is written and performed with wit, verve and an overriding sense of fun and mischief by Fringe debutante Michelle Sewell. Its roots lie in real events, drawing on Michelle's own experiences as an immigrant in the UK. Also from Australia, Michelle's visa expires this October and, like Alice, she doesn't feel as though she belongs in the country of her birth and doesn't want to leave the country she now calls home.

The show confronts notions of individual displacement and identity as the UK prepares to leave the European Union. It explores the distressing experiences of having to leave behind the people you love and the place you've made your home.

Dysney Disfunction is directed by Cambridge Junction's Regional Young Theatre Director, David Gilbert (who also works with Frantic Assembly and New International Encounter). It has been developed with Soho Theatre, Cambridge Junction, The Barbican and Norwich Arts Centre with support from The UEA Enterprise Fund and StartEast.

Michelle Sewell was a Soho Young Company writer and a winner of the Malcolm Bradbury Award. She created HACK Theatre in 2016. Based at Norwich Arts Centre HACK recently toured sell-out production, Border Control, which combined performance and debate, engaging audiences in discussions about immigration with MPs and other political figures. She considers herself more of a writer than an actor but felt compelled to perform the semi-autobiographical Dysney Disfunction herself.

https://www.assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/dysney-disfunction

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