EDINBURGH 2023: I Hope Your Flowers Bloom Q&A

BWW catches up with Raymond Wilson to chat about bringing I Hope Your Flowers Bloom to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about I Hope Your Flowers Bloom.

IHYFB is me being an anxious romantic on stage for an hour and using plant metaphors to try and hide it. It’s an energetic one-person piece that uses storytelling, humour, and poetic-prose to follow a working-class man who attempts to use a new relationship, with van-lifer Flo, to escape his grey Glaswegian environment and into the Scottish natural world. It’s a show about self-worth, working-class access to green spaces, and unhealthy masculinity, that really wishes it could just be a rom-com or maybe a nature documentary. It’s also semi-autobiographical, because it’s my debut feature-length theatre show and I’m in my late-20s and so what else would it be.

Why did you feel this was an important story to tell?

Over the past few years I’d become pretty frustrated at the lack of mainstream work across the arts that dealt with vulnerability in straight (or straight-presenting) men, especially in the working-class Scottish canon. It must exist, but I couldn’t find many stories that explored male body image with sensitivity, or that looked at positive interactions between masculinity and nature, or where men admitted, in an open and honest way, their failings when it came to interactions with women. Men are currently in the process of re-framing masculinity, and I’ve had conversations with other men about our insecurities and self-esteem, but I didn’t feel this had been represented much in the arts yet. So I wanted to fill that gap, and offer a perspective of uncertainty and vulnerability and fallibility, as well as connection with nature, that is not often afforded men, particularly straight-presenting men, and particularly working-class men.

Tell us a bit about the creative team.

It’s dreamy. Fiona Mackinnon has been on-board as the director and general collaborator since the show’s initial development last year, and she is just one of those creatives that instil such playfulness and confidence into the making of something. As well as continually contributing such exciting (and often hilarious) ideas to the project, Fiona has been my sounding board for all sorts of confused rants and indulgent explanations of my writing. Then there’s Emma Collins, who produces the show under All the Figs, and has been a complete superhero in getting this whole thing on its feet and into the Made in Scotland Showcase.

When it comes to design elements there’s James Johnson (of getMade Design) who built and designed such a lovely little set that represents the urban-meets-idealised-nature aesthetic of the show (while, conveniently, being compact and transportable for eventual touring!). And there’s Maria Macdonald, our brilliant lighting designer and the resident technician at the Scottish Storytelling Centre where the show will be running, who always has a funny story to tell and a willingness to whack a gobo into place.

The thing that really reminds me that the show is real and not just something I’m thinking up as a sad-boi in my bedroom anymore is the Fringe poster, which is a collaboration between images taken by Jassy Earl and design by Laura Whitehouse. That’s one of those design elements that I had such a specific image of in my head when I even first started writing the show and to see it now as a physical thing out in the world brings me so much joy, and it’s all thanks to our creative team who has brought this all to life in a way that is beyond what I ever could have done alone.

How has it been received so far?

It made my mates cry, so anything beyond this now is just a bonus really.

What would you like audiences to take away from it?

I would like those who have experienced unhealthy romantic obsession and low self-esteem to laugh/cringe along. I would like people to get an insight into the male experience of physical and mental self-esteem. Most of all though, I would like you to be able to remember at least one of the facts about plants that I teach during the show and impress a date with it (please note though that this doesn’t really work-out for me in the story…).

Photo credit: Jassy Earl

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