EDINBURGH 2023: SQUARE PEG Q&A

BWW caught up with Simeon Morris to chat about bringing Square Peg to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

What is Square Peg?

Have you ever felt like something was amiss, like you didn't quite fit in, as if everything you did to earn the love and belonging you craved kept collapsing like a house of cards?

As if the feeling of being worthy of love and belonging was forever just outside your reach?

Then Square Peg might just speak to you.

It's about love and pain and loss.

It's about sensuous silken fabrics draped on the bias, and Body Shop Cucumber Cleanser.

It's about broken hearts.

It's about a wounded man who wounded his son.

It's about cross dressing.

It's about a young South Asian prostitute, and a German photographer called Sophie.

It's about sex and it's about handcrafted leather accessories.

It's about poetry and blackbirds.

It's about mid-life crises and when your back's against the wall.

It's about catharsis.

And finally, it's about hope.

Square Peg is a story about crisis as an awakening, a call to arms, if you will, to live more fully in the time we have at our disposal.

Using a hodgepodge of clowning, physical theatre, music, poetry, birdsong and sewing, with a dress making demonstration chucked in for good measure, Square Peg seeks to chart a path through this tangled thicket of grief; suggesting maybe that art could save us all.

What was the inspiration behind it?

Whilst studying for my MA at East 15, I began to devise Square Peg alone, starting with all the things I had left behind to pursue acting, namely, sewing and making things. I had a huge piece of black fabric which I played with onstage, and I saw that it was my shadow, and so the story starting to spring from that, from my life, my experiences with a troubling childhood and the dysfunctional things I'd done for years to try to feel better...

In a way, the play is an ouroboros, it's about everything I did that led up to me going to drama school and making a play about everything I did that led up to me going to drama school... 

Why bring it to Edinburgh?

I really want to test this piece in such a frenzied and exciting area as the Fringe Festival. I know that audiences are discerning, and I want to see if Square Peg stands up. I want to experience the difficulty of doing a 2 week run, to test my mettle, and to try to get it programmed down the line.

Who would I like to come and see the show?

I know people say this, but I really do think there is something for most people in this show. I'm speaking to a very human experience, and previous audiences have consisted of both young and old, male and female, being touched by it, and enjoying it. That said, I think it will especially appeal to anyone who works in fashion or costuming, and also to anyone who's experienced or who is experiencing a bit of a Mid Life Crisis.

What would you like audiences to take away from it?

Is really that, there is hope, however dark it gets. We can heal, and we all matter, we all have a creative voice, hidden deep within, if we'll only take the time to search it out, and give it a change to breathe and live. You don't have to be a great artist to just be an artist. It doesn't have to be poetry, or acting or painting, it can be baking bread, or learning the penny whistle, or growing roses, or pimping your car. As long as it's REALLY you, and your voice, then that is the way to go.

Tickets are available here: 

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