15 MINUTES OF SHAME to Make Edinburgh Fringe Debut at ZOO Playground
Ellen Pallant and Anton Bibby star in Sean Stillmaker's comedy directed by Adébayo Bolaji.
15 Minutes of Shame will come to the ZOO (Playground 2), High School Yard, Edinburgh, EH1 1LZ. Performances will run Friday 7th - Sunday 30th August 2026.
Written by award-winning investigative journalist Sean Stillmaker, with nearly two decades' experience, 15 Minutes of Shame is a carefully calibrated, biting comedy infused with raw drama. This provocative and unflinching mirror to our times explores the escalating cost of monetising intimacy. In an era where the pressure to commodify private life for digital profit is no longer niche but a modern survival strategy, the gig economy of platforms like OnlyFans sits at the centre of this urgent story.
The play follows HER, performed by actor-musician and multi-instrumentalist Ellen Pallant (Our Mothers' Daughters, Redbridge Drama Centre / Hen & Chickens; Caligari, New Diorama / Underbelly, Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2022), and HIM, performed by Liverpool actor Anton Bibby (Darkroom, Met Film Productions; Thomas in The Cage, BBC), as a young London couple facing brutal financial insecurity. Exhausted by curated online success and frustrated by their limited social media reach, they turn to OnlyFans in pursuit of fame and escape from the cost of living crisis. As their subscriber base grows, their real-world connection begins to fracture.
Directed by Adébayo Bolaji, multidisciplinary artist with work at Shakespeare's Globe and The National Theatre, 15 Minutes of Shame gives voice to lived realities at the intersection of survival and selfexposure. The play charts a young couple's descent into the labour of digital sex content creation and online persona-building, exposing the emotional, psychological and relational costs of monetising intimacy. Their private struggle becomes a microcosm of wider socio-economic pressures that both enable and punish sex work and self-commodification.
Grounded in extensive research into the hidden economics of content creation, the play moves beyond familiar narratives of overnight success. It foregrounds the often-overlooked realities faced by creators, including debanking, deplatforming and the long-term impact on relationships and mental health.
Adébayo Bolaji, director, comments, This play confronts the uncomfortable truth about what we are willing to trade for visibility. It is about desire, contradiction and the quiet erosion of self or ironically the discovery of it.
Sean Stillmaker, writer making their playwrighting debut, comments, This play boldly challenges the conversational dialogue around this taboo and timely subject matter. We're often fed headlines of creators making it, but that is hardly the reality for most.
At its heart, 15 Minutes of Shame speaks to a generation navigating unprecedented economic and social pressure, forced to renegotiate privacy, identity and survival in an increasingly digital world where visibility itself becomes currency.
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