TEMPING Returns To Edinburgh in August

Contrasting the anonymity of recording births and deaths in Excel spreadsheet with furtive moments of human intimacy, interactive show from Dutch Kills Theater and Wolf 359 examines mortality, capitalism and the value of a human life. Sarah Jane Tully, a 53-year-old actuary, has gone on vacation and the audience member steps in to cover for her. As they update her spreadsheets, they realise her job involves calculating the life expectancy of strangers. Meanwhile, an intra-office romance is spilling out of the printer, the phone bleeps with recorded messages, emails land in the inbox, and all the inner life of Sarah is there for anyone who has access to her cubicle and computer. Temping is a show with no performers, just an audience and the ether. It returns to Edinburgh Festival Fringe following a critically acclaimed run in 2022, and Adelaide Fringe run where it won a Best of the Fest award. 

Temping is an interactive solo show performed by the audience with the collaboration of a Windows PC, a corporate phone, a laser printer and Microsoft Office. The pace of the show is dictated by the audience member: how many emails they respond to, how fast they complete the tasks, and how much of the office they decide to explore. 

Writer Michael Yates Crowley said, “I was interested in the idea that inanimate objects and technology could be performers. That I could write for a phone or fax machine the way you would write for an actor. Or at least that characters could speak through these devices — just as in our lives, particularly during the worst moments of the pandemic, the people that matter to us appear as messages and phone calls and streaming video. 

"Last year's fringe and the Adelaide fringe in March gave us such insight into how different cultures react to the piece. Every performance is unique and it is really fascinating to watch diverse audiences react to the piece so differently."  

Dutch Kills Theater is a theatre company based in New York that focuses on developing and producing new writing by the most exciting emerging artists in the city. Formed in 2011, the company were previously at the Edinburgh Fringe with The Sister by Eric John Meyer and Adventure Quest by Richard Lovejoy in 2016. They followed this with the critically-acclaimed The Providence of Neighbouring Bodies by Jean Ann Douglass in 2018, and Solitary – a searing exploration of the use of solitary confinement in the US prison system by Duane Cooper and Blake Haberman – in 2019. In 2021 they performed the immersive UK premiere of Ben Beckley and Asa Wember's KlaxAlterian Sequester on demand, and with Temping in 2022 they also presented Intelligence at Assembly Roxy. 

Wolf 359 is a New York City-based company of narrative technologists. Their work exists at the intersection of theatre, technology, and experience. Since the company's founding in 2007 by Michael Yates Crowley and Michael Rau, Wolf 359 work has been shown in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Dublin, Edinburgh, and many other cities and city-states. Previous shows at Edinburgh Festival Fringe include Righteous Money 

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