SLUGS to Make World Premiere at Edinburgh Fringe
Writer and performer Tobias Graham brings the semi-autobiographical show to Pleasance Courtyard's Bunker One.
Writer and performer Tobias Graham will bring Slugs, a provocative, darkly funny and formally daring piece of new solo work exploring gay shame, desire, memory and the ethics of storytelling, to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. Playing with confession, control and complicity, the piece continually shifts beneath the audience's feet, interrogating the line between performance, truth and exploitation. Performances will run 5th – 30th August (not 18th & 25th).
We meet Tobi in his childhood bedroom beneath a 2008 Hollyoaks Hunks calendar as he guides the audience through a kaleidoscopic series of memories, moving through queer adolescence, Zac Efron's snail trail, Chatroulette, and illicit encounters with predatory older men.
Threaded throughout these recollections is a recent, confusing sexual encounter that has resurfaced the shame Tobi long thought buried and dormant. Shame manifests as slugs, covering him head-to-toe, with every unwanted kiss, disappointing lover and confused indignity leaving its oozy mark. His memories grow more intense, with Tobi increasingly unable to control them.
As Tobi's version of events becomes increasingly elaborate and self-aggrandising, an unexpected interruption erodes and fractures the authority of his own narrative. The one-man show that audiences at the Fringe have come to expect collapses in on itself, questioning the ethics of turning complicated, shared experiences with jagged edges into neat, morally simplistic and aesthetic narratives.
Witty, unsettling and emotionally raw, Slugs questions the audience's instinct to accept a charismatic narrator at face value, and its willingness to treat confessional storytelling as unquestionable truth. Along the way, with darkly comic undertones, the play confronts the ugliness of human sexuality, desire and shame as Tobi challenges the audience to accept him, even if they may find aspects of his sexuality repulsive.
Semi-autobiographical, informed by moments in Graham's own life, Slugs uses visceral imagery to create psychological unease. The production will work with specialist SFX designers from film and television, to create unsettling effects that bring an additional layer of discomfort to this already gritty piece. Knotty, provocative and unexpectedly liberating, Slugs is a fierce examination of sex and shame and the narratives we construct to make sense of them.
About Tobias Graham
Tobias Graham is a London-based writer and performer whose work explores queer discomfort, shame and empowerment through unapologetically disruptive storytelling. He trained in playwriting at The New School in New York and The Drama Centre in London. Graham's debut play Sink was selected for the first Foreword Festival at The Space Arts Centre in 2019 and was performed at The Blue Room Theatre in Perth in 2020. His monologues have appeared in festivals including The Alchymy Festival with The North Wall in 2021. His next play is set for a major London production in 2027 directed by former Donmar Warehouse Artistic Director Michael Longhurst.
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