BWW catches up with Shelf to chat about bringing Hair to the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Tell us a bit about Hair.
Hair is the story of our friendship, and all the weird stuff we noticed when Ruby cut her hair and started being perceived as masculine next to Rachel, who had always been perceived as masculine. Plus it's all singing and all dancing, meaning Ruby sings, and Rachel dances. It's a really fun show, and we can't wait for people to see it.
Who are Shelf?
Shelf are us, Rachel and Ruby. We are two childhood best friends from South London who bonded over a shared love of skateboarding. As all double acts must, we eventually replaced skateboarding with comedy, and here we are. Despite the fact that only one of us is musical we decided musical comedy was our destiny. Come see us and try to guess which of us is tone deaf!
Why did you want to tell this story?
The haircut this story is about gave us a fun and interesting way into talking about gender presentation, gender perception, and misogyny. We wanted to do that with as many jokes and songs as possible. We want to tell this story because it's unique to our personal experiences and friendship while being relatable to universal experiences of gender and society. Also it's funny.
Where might we have seen you before?
You might have seen us on BBC3 with a sketch about how lesbians have sex, or at the Soho Theatre running a regular night with our comedy collective The LOL Word. You might also have seen us at comedy clubs and festivals across the UK, hawking our wares. You may have seen us in the finals of competitions like Funny Women and The Musical Comedy Awards (what you won't have seen is us winning. Always the bridesmaids).
Who would you like to come and see Hair?
We would like everybody to come and see Hair. Hair is about universal experiences of gender that everybody can relate to, even if they might not have thought about it much before; some of the best feedback we've gotten is from people who thought they wouldn't "get" this show. So basically, come see it, and bring your straight grandfather too.
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Photo credit: Corrine Cumming
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