Figs in Wigs present Big Finish, a new show born from a rational fear of the end of the world and the death of theatre, Big Finish is a collective scream into the void – with jokes. A mashup of theatre, dance, TED talk and string quintet (untrained), Big Finish is a collage of ideas about endings, rebirth and regeneration.
A show within a show, Big Finish parodies human nature’s desire to bury our heads in the sand in the face of real peril. It comments on the predicament theatre faces in the wake of funding cuts and losing audiences and practitioners to its more popular cultural cousin – the television. But, as always, the theatre becomes a microcosm for something bigger – an exploration of apocalypse itself.
Big Finish is at HOME, Manchester 21st to 24th February and Battersea Arts Centre 14th – 27th March 2024.
Big Finish is coming to Battersea Arts Centre, what can you tell us about the show?
Big Finish is a big fat mess of a show. A wrecking ball of chaos, oscillating between giving up and smashing the house down. It’s about the end of the world, the death of theatre and the end of Figs in Wigs – maybe?
But it’s not all doom and gloom. We do put down our sad violins for a few scenes – offering up the usual Figs in Wigs synchronised dance routines and abstract comedy.
What inspired you to create Big Finish?
Like most of our shows, Big Finish started as a joke. We often laughed at our strange little life: loading up a van with all our weird props and costumes, taking them to a new place, showing them to people for a couple of hours, then putting them back in the van and taking them home. There’s so much labour that goes into a show that no one ever sees. It’s ridiculous, slightly excessive, and with the golden age of television luring lots of performance makers away we began to feel that theatre might be a dying artform…..
We were interested in cycles and labour, but also mess and catastrophe. ‘Maybe it’s a show about the end of the world, and the death of theatre?’
Then the pandemic hit, and we wondered whether we had manifested it? Theatre was over, the end of the world was edging closer…
4 years later, and the project has continuously been delayed by the pandemic and funding rejections. We are tired and feel battered and bruised. We’ve begun to feel some real disillusion with the industry: how much you have to run, only to find you haven’t got very far at all. Once you have emerged, you are just left to fend for yourself, kicking and screaming. Are we on the edge of burnout?
What started as a joke about ‘The End’ may well turn out to be our last show. But it is all fuel and we are taking it in our stride! The ship is sinking, but it hasn’t fully submerged yet. You can sink, you can swim, but you can also tread water. It doesn’t look or feel great but buys you some time…
It’s more than just theatre isn’t it, what’s the biggest challenge in bringing all of these mediums together?
All of our shows are more than just theatre – it’s a real mash up of forms. We call ourselves a theatre company because it’s the simplest description. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do, and we love bringing other creatives and disciplines into the mix. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly (and foolishly), not having the skills to be able to do something never stops us, we just work it out as we go along.
The biggest challenge is probably having too many ideas, and having ideas that are too big or expensive! We regularly have to shrink our dreams into something more manageable, whilst still trying to stay true to the original idea.
How does this show fit into Figs in Wigs ethos of making work?
Like all our shows, collaboration is at the heart of our process – which is why our process takes so long! The glue that keeps us together is that we still find each other funny. The day we stop laughing at/with each other is the day we hang up the wigs.
However in some ways this does feel like a slightly more grown up show because as with all our shows our real life concerns always end up bleeding into the content. And we do feel unsettled and scared about the future, politically, personally & environmentally. So, whilst the show definitely has lots of our usual laugh out loud moments it’s maybe tinged with a darkness this time…maybe we’re laughing to stop ourselves from crying. We hope it’ll be cathartic though! Everyone seems to feel similarly at the moment so maybe screaming together is better than screaming alone? Answers on a postcard please.
What are you looking forward to most about working at Battersea Arts Centre?
We first performed at Battersea Arts Centre in 2013, at an event that took over the whole building. There were something wild like 50 performance spaces that night! From the theatres, to broom cupboards. We performed on the staircase. We were very impressed with the colossal and ambitious nature of the event, inspired by the fabric of the building (so much space to play with!). Since then, we have brought two of our productions to the venue. We love being in the building and performing to BAC audiences, who are some of the best! We love how people stick around after and want to talk in the bar about the production. Rehearsing there is equally lovely – popping down for a tea or lunch in the cafe and meeting the other great artists who are also working in the building, from Forced Entertainment to Katy Baird to Krishna Istha! It truly is a vibrant incubator of contemporary performance and we feel very lucky to be a part of that.
And also – Cafe Parisienne lunches! If you haven’t been, GO! Get the veggie wrap.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Big Finish?
It is definitely a dark show dealing with quite intense themes, but it is also joyous. It’s about collective action and trying to keep each other above the water. The end is nigh, but not that nigh and we aren’t going anywhere…yet.
If you feel tired and fed up this is the show for you! We can’t promise to fix anything, but we will try to distract you for one hour and bring you into a strange Fig universe which pokes fun at humanity itself.
