Victoria Melody's HEAD SET is Coming to Edinburgh Fringe This Summer
Victoria's strange journey is a joyful and mischievous celebration of our messy minds.
Delving into amateur stand-up culture and trying to make peace with a messy brain, the new documentary-theatre show from Victoria Melody sees her in wearable tech, scanning her brain as she delivers jokes. Fed up with theatre-making after a hard tour, Victoria Melody fell back onto her plan b: she decided to try to crack stand-up comedy. But what sounded like genius in her head came out of her mouth as a garbled mess, so she sought the help of a speech and language therapist which led to her eventual diagnosis as neurodivergent. Always the experimenter, she took her late age diagnosis of ADHD and autism to neuroscientists and started working with them, wearing tech on stage to find out what happens in the brain when you tell jokes. Victoria's strange journey is a joyful and mischievous celebration of our messy minds.
Victoria Melody is a documentary-theatre maker who embeds herself in her topic for several years: in Northern Soul, she became a pigeon fancier and a northern soul fan, Major Tom (Argus Angel Award, Total Theatre Award and Arches Brick award) was about becoming a beauty queen and a championship dog handler (getting to Crufts). She followed up with Hair Peace to find out where her human hair extensions came from, and Ugly Chief performed with her dad about his terminal diagnosis and giving him a living funeral. They later found out he had been misdiagnosed.
Victoria Melody said, "Women are often underdiagnosed with ADHD and autism because we are so good at masking our differences to try and fit in. I was taught by a comedy teacher that there are rules and formulas to writing jokes and whilst I was conforming to this structure I was dying on stage. Head Set shows us that there is the way we present ourselves but then there is also what makes us spontaneously and uniquely funny. It's about capitalising on our particular strangeness. It's a show for people who were bullied for being different."
Running Time: 1 hr | Suitable for ages 14+
August 3rd-28th.
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