EDINBURGH 2026: Tobias Graham on SLUGS Guest Blog
Slugs runs at Edfringe 5 - 30 August
Writer and performer Tobias Graham guest blogs for BWW about bringing Slugs to the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Performance and Truth – Changing the space between character and reality.
We’re no stranger to autobiographical theatre making anymore. Every year, artists and performers bare their souls, share their deepest secrets, their traumas and their joy to produce electrifying and challenging shows. Some of them end up on the telly. Some are the biggest stars right now. Some find themselves embroiled in controversy.
When I started playwriting whilst on a study abroad in New York over a decade ago, I was drawn to writers who destabilised the space. Sarah Kane changed my life, Martin Crimp made me squirm, and countless others taught me that theatre has the unique ability to build a relationship with its live audience. Autobiographical theatre takes that a step further; a performer builds an authentic relationship with their audience by vulnerably recounting their truth. My new show Slugs, which I am debuting at the Edinburgh Fringe this year, is directly inspired by this relationship.
Slugs is an autobiographical solo. It follows me - or Tobi, who is a version of me - in the wake of a seemingly unsettling event. Throughout his show, Tobi is attempting to make sense of it all by journeying back through his sexual discovery, from childhood to adulthood. Tobi is me, Tobi’s journey is mine; the experiences he’s had, and the ways he processes all of them are entirely true to myself. In writing this show, the most interesting part became my expectation that an audience would take this as total non-fiction, that they would root for me and they would believe my story. Because what if my truth was able to be disputed?
Curiosity in the truth can be helpful and unhelpful in the world of autobiographical theatre making; it makes us want to engage in a piece, but it can also take us beyond the show, compelling us to want to know all the ins and outs of the real story. Baby Reindeer captivated us, and once the story was catapulted by Netflix, internet sleuths needed answers. What was true and what was fiction - and at what point can the search for that truth become destructive to the show? From the outset of Slugs, I didn’t want to ignore this curiosity - I wanted to interrogate it and see how it could be explored in a way that didn’t disparage this form of theatre, but began to properly comment on it.
My personal questions over autobiographical theatre making are the ethics of involving other people who don’t get a voice in the story. The storyteller has the power, they are able to represent people in whichever light they choose - more often than not in favour of themselves. I think, therefore, we as writers must accept some responsibility in having our narratives questioned. There’s three sides to every story: mine, yours, and the truth. One of the most pivotal elements in the story I tell in Slugs does involve another individual, and I can’t pretend I haven’t felt a need to exercise some caution in my involvement of them. Ultimately, I’m telling our story from my perspective, and there is absolutely a world in which their perspective is vastly different.
For the most part, Slugs is autobiographical, and so it’s not a role I could simply pass on to another actor. But, in order to play with the grey area and the blurred lines of acknowledging that this is only my side of the story, I eventually needed to introduce Tobi as a more fictionalised version of myself. As the play evolves, Tobi becomes a character, and he becomes a character who is able to become a more objective viewer of his own solo show. In achieving this, my hope is that the theatre space becomes unstable and the audience find themselves in a place they perhaps haven’t before.
Slugs was not written to be an easy watch. There’s comedy, there’s fun, and there’s also an incessant undercurrent of unease. I want this show to start conversations on the tricky subject matters that it deals with: sex, sexuality and consent. But I hope it also begins a new conversation, a conversation about theatre itself, the power it wields in its ability to blur the boundaries between fiction and truth, and what the repercussions of that can be on the real people involved.
Slugs will be performed at 12:55pm at Pleasance Courtyard from 5th-30th August.
Booking link: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/slugs
Photo credit: MOJA
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