TEN WAYS TO DIE HAPPY to Make International Premiere at Edinburgh Fringe

Ten Ways to Die Happy is collective theatrical game where audience members begin a new life and must decide the best way to spend it. The production will make its international premiere at Cowbarn, Underbelly, Bistro Square, 5 – 31 August.

An exploration of how we spend our time while we're alive, a quiz theatre show selects ten audience members to embark on a new "life" symbolised by a bouquet of flowers. As they spend their flowers – each representing energy and time – on love, ambition, risk, and security, the goal is to discover true happiness before they run out, and it's game over. Guided by a professional actor in the role of Quiz Master, and with the audience shaping the world around them, participants navigate a blend of games and challenges where every decision changes the course of their existence. Ten Ways to Die is a participatory, funny, and human experience that is different with every performance, offering a closer look at mortality through the lens of the choices we make.

Ten Ways to Die Happy is an adaptation of the Italian Dieci Modi Per Morire Felici. Developed at the Fondazione Teatri di Reggio Emilia in a year-long process led by two of Italy's most significant contemporary playwrights Emanuele Aldrovandi and Jacopo Giacomoni, it has played all around Italy for the past two years to sell out audiences and critical acclaim. 

Emanuele Aldrovandi said: “I wanted to create an interactive show that would genuinely change based on the audience's choices, while still retaining its dramatic power and without becoming intrusive toward the spectators.” 

Emanuele Aldrovandi is an Italian playwright, director, and novelist working across theatre, cinema, and literature. Trained in Philosophy and at the Paolo Grassi National Academy in Milan, he is one of the leading voices in contemporary Italian playwriting, with award-winning works (Riccione/Tondelli, Pirandello, Hystrio) produced and translated throughout Europe. His connection with the UK includes the London staging of Sorry We Didn't Die at Sea at Park Theatre (published by Salamander Street) and the inclusion of The Fattest Woman in the World in a 2025 Methuen Drama anthology. As a director he has collaborated with major Italian National Theatres, while his short films have screened internationally (Bataclan, Silver Ribbon 2021 for Best Italian Short Film). His debut novel, Il nostro grande niente (Einaudi, 2024), received the John Fante Award and the Severino Cesari “Debut Fiction” Award. He is artistic director of Associazione Teatrale Autori Vivi, founder of Sisifo Production, and co-artistic director of LOVE Festival and Teatro del Fiume. He teaches writing at Scuola Holden and at the Paolo Grassi National Academy.

Jacopo Giacomoni is an Italian dramaturg and performer whose work explores structuralist dramaturgy, audience participation, and game-based theatrical devices. Graduated in Philosophy with a thesis on the existence of fictional characters, he develops performance mechanisms that interact with chance, collective imagination, and ritual forms. He has won several major awards, including the Riccione Prize 2025 (Italy's most prestigious award for new writing). He has worked as an author with the Venice Biennale, winning its 2024 call for new dramaturgy, and he is currently dramaturg of Mittelfest. His international experience includes multiple periods of work and research abroad, such as a 2024 artistic residency in Chile, supported by the Italian Cultural Institute of Santiago and the University of Playa Ancha in Valparaíso. As a performer, he combines acting with experimental saxophone practice, exploring free improvisation and non-idiomatic sound.

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