THE PAINTED REVOLUTIONARY to Make World Premiere at Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Tip Top Theatre Collective's political satire follows 'Struggle' navigating Order, Revolution, and Justice.
Tip Top Theatre Collective will bring The Painted Revolutionary to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a political satire in which the abstractions at the heart of every political argument are reimagined as people. These characters represent the forces, beliefs and ideologies through which people decide what is just, necessary and worth fighting for.
Centred around 'Struggle' and her battle to bring about change, the comedy-drama acts as the lens through which centuries of political history are unpicked, questioned and brought uncomfortably up to date.
We meet Struggle in the bookshop where she lives and works; it is full of extraordinary ideas, though largely empty of people. It is a life that functions, just about, until a visit from Order changes something. He stops by under the guise of concern, but he cares more about ensuring things stay “as they should”. The visit awakens in Struggle a craving for a more liberated life, one that is entirely at odds with everything Order wants for her. For the first time in a very long time, people begin to listen, and with that comes the possibility of change.
Word travels fast. 'Revolution', Struggle's ex and a firm believer that change cannot happen without him, arrives at the bookshop ready to help. Caught between Order's suffocating insistence that things stay exactly as they are and Revolution's intoxicating certainty that they don't have to, and with the troublesome triplets 'Love', 'Passion' and 'Hate' adding complications at every turn, Struggle must decide where her allegiances lie. When the ideological distance between herself and Order becomes impossible to ignore, she makes her move, throwing her lot in with Revolution and recruiting 'Justice', 'Faith' and 'Class' to help build a movement capable of finally overthrowing Order's grip on the world around her.
Struggle is the unglamorous, unacknowledged foundation on which every political shift in history has been built, the prerequisite that Revolution depends on and rarely acknowledges. Drawing on the world's great thinkers from Rousseau and Voltaire to Marx and Hobbes, The Painted Revolutionary asks something that feels incredibly timely: not just what these ideas mean, but who gets to decide and whether two people invoking the same powerful word have ever truly meant the exact same thing.
At its core we see Struggle's experience as a woman navigating a political world whose terms were never set with her in mind. Equally, it's a sweeping tour of historical political conflict across the millennia through witty and grounded dialogue. The Painted Revolutionary blends the personal and the historical to unpick the pitfalls of politics and leave audiences more alive to the landscape they are already living in. In the volatile political climate of the real world, when protest can feel futile and progress can seem impossible, the question it leaves hanging is the oldest one in politics: is change ever truly worth the cost?
The Painted Revolutionary performs 7th to 15th August at theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (Theatre 1) at 19:25.
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