Edinburgh Fringe Interview: Alley Scott on Double Take at Underbelly Bristo Square

You’re the Producer and Artistic Director of Double Take at Underbelly Bristo Square. What can you tell us about the show?

As the Artistic Director of Dutch Kills Theater Company, I was thrilled to co-produce Double Take with Broken Box Mime Theater.

The show is made up of eight distinct pieces, ranging widely in style and emotion, all told by two performers entirely through the art of contemporary mime.

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Double Take is a wordless mime piece combining puppetry and physical theatre. What drew you to this style of storytelling?

I love this kind of storytelling because it strips everything back to what you actually need. Just the human body.

Honestly, I love how little it needs.

We live in an age where people are so disconnected from their own bodies, and this piece is a beautiful antidote to that.

It almost feels a bit like a rebellion to watch just two people tell a whole story with nothing but movement.

Even the “puppets” are just their hands, transformed into little animal proxies right in front of you. It’s a magic trick you can see the mechanics of and still fall for.

That’s what pulled me in, and why I wanted to help Broken Box take it all the way to Edinburgh.

The show is made up of eight short stories, ranging from the everyday to the cosmic. How did you approach shaping such a varied yet cohesive experience?

Broken Box has fifteen years and twenty company members’ worth of material to pull from, and they do genuinely stunning large-ensemble work.

But Double Take strips things down to just two performers, and that constraint is where its particular beauty lives.

So when they were choosing pieces, they were hunting for ones that could survive and thrive in that tight, intimate two-person world.

Then it becomes a matter of sequencing.

Honestly, curating this show feels a lot like making a great mixtape for someone you love. You want the highs, the lows, the weird detour in the middle.

You’re thinking carefully about the journey you want to take the audience on, moment to moment.

This production has already had success at Edinburgh Fringe 2025 and Adelaide Fringe 2026. How has the show evolved for this year’s run?

The “set list” shifts with every cast, and this year we’ve gone a little overboard.

We have three, count them, THREE (!), different casts performing in Edinburgh.

So depending on which night you come, you might catch familiar pieces reinterpreted by new performers, or stumble into entirely new material you’ve never seen before.

Broken Box Mime Theater has a mission to “contemporise the art of mime”. How do you think Double Take challenges audience expectations of mime?

Dutch Kills only makes new work, so that shared instinct in Broken Box is exactly what pulled me towards them in the first place.

Most people hear “mime” and picture something stuck in amber, a kind of relic from a Parisian street corner decades ago.

Broken Box takes that same technique and points it at things we actually recognise, like someone losing a fight with a YouTube cooking tutorial, a woman staring down an impossible choice, or someone taking a break at a party.

And they do this right alongside abstract ideas like the Big Bang, climate change and ageing.

They have taken an older form and made it radically new with exciting techniques and strikingly contemporary subject matter.

What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Double Take?

This is a show you’ll walk away from changed.

You’ll laugh, and you’ll cry. I know that sounds like a cliché, but I mean it.

We genuinely want to hear from you afterward, so stick around and talk to us!