Caitlin McEwan Will Return to Edinburgh Fringe With TWO LITTLE PIGS

Edinburgh-born actor, writer and former winner of the Charlie Hartill Fund, Caitlin McEwan will return to the Edinburgh Fringe with Two Little Pigs, a dark and absurdist two-hander that spotlights the seductive pull of hypermasculinity and the dangers it poses to women and men.

Following a young man whose worldview has become corrupted by resentment towards the women in his life (and beyond) who have power over him, and insecurity around his inability to find his role and how to be needed as a man in the modern world, the play interrogates the allure of rigid ideas and rules when it comes to gender roles and what happens when those beliefs collide with a female talking pig! Sharp, surreal, wickedly funny and unexpectedly moving, the play places a harsh spotlight on society's responsibility for the male loneliness epidemic and those (particularly women) caught in its clutches, without letting men absolve themselves of their own toxic behaviour.

When Mark's long-term girlfriend leaves him following his descent into Andrew Tate rhetoric and protein-obsessed alpha-male thinking, he adopts a pet pig - something he can control, something uncomplicated. Dumped, in denial, and desperate, Mark is seeking easy companionship. But Pig, played by the same actor as his ex-girlfriend, has other ideas. And so, Mark finds himself living with a walking, talking hog obsessed with feminist literature and determined to dismantle his worldview one argument at a time.

Raised on a progressive all-female farm and armed with half-understood feminist theory, Pig has developed a taste for Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (despite her obvious lack of opposable thumbs) and ecstatic dance and seeks to challenge Mark's ideology at every possible opportunity. What follows is a turbulent and unexpectedly moving relationship: Mark attempts to impose his ideas about masculinity, power and traditional gender roles onto Pig; she pushes him to reconsider how he relates to women and vulnerability and what he feels the world owes him. As their chaotic bond deepens, the play blurs the line between human and animal. Pig reluctantly begins to recognise the source of Mark's confusion, anger and disconnection whilst Mark unwillingly realises that the myth of male superiority only leads to more pain and isolation. Radical compassion and empathy might just unite these two polar-opposite figures after all…but just as a truce seems possible, the play shatteringly questions whether hope can really survive against man's basest animal instincts.

Bold, surreal and politically sharp, Two Little Pigs speaks directly to some of the most urgent cultural conversations of the moment: the rise of the manosphere, male loneliness and the women who are too often the victims of something they had no hand in creating. Told through a sharply comic female perspective, the play explores the seductive pull of certainty and binary thinking in an unstable and nuanced world, what men are really searching for in their quest to prove superiority, and who is expected to continually pick up the pieces and suffer the consequences when these constructed worldviews of male domination inevitably crumble.

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