Slugs - Tobias Graham on queer shame, desire and Slugs at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

At this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, writer and performer Tobias Graham presents Slugs, a semi-autobiographical show examining gay shame, desire and the ethics of confessional storytelling. Set in a childhood bedroom beneath a Hollyoaks Hunks calendar circa 2008, the production follows one man as he spirals through memories of queer adolescence and vulnerability. Through its exploration of sex, shame and the stories people construct to survive them, Slugs offers a provocative and witty perspective on growing up queer. We caught up with Tobias to find out more about the show.

One of the ideas running through Slugs is that audiences are often willing to believe a confident storyteller. What made you want to examine that relationship between performer and audience?

The conversation around Baby Reindeer was a big inspiration. We had a gripping story, brilliantly told, and we were obsessed with discovering the truth and uncovering who the real-life people behind the characters were. For me, at least, this happens a lot when I watch autobiographical shows. I’m so curious about the real and the not real. Sometimes, the searching for that truth proves really destructive, and people who didn’t choose to be involved can be thrust into a strange spotlight. My curiosity in that relationship between audience and performer is really what propelled the writing of this show. I had the grounding of the autobiographical solo show, but I felt confident that my curiosity would allow me to slowly unpick this over the course of the play. By the end of the show, I hope audiences will feel really exhilarated. 

The play revisits memories from 2000s queer adolescence, from a Hollyoaks Hunks calendar to Chatroulette. How important was it to anchor the story in those very specific cultural reference points?

Firstly, the Hollyoaks Hunks 2008 calendar is incredibly important to me and I cannot encourage you enough to Google it. But yes, these reference points - Hollyoaks, Chatroulette, Zac Efron - needed to be specific. I think I was always scared of specificity in my writing. Someone told me once my reference to Ariana Grande in a play totally took them out of it, but ultimately authenticity comes from being specific. My favourite writing makes the specific things relatable. We take our own experiences and map them on to others. No one else needs to have been enamoured with those Hollyoaks Hunks to understand how significant a part they played in my sexual awakening. My gran had Marlon Brando. My mum had Donny Osmond.  My friends had Meghan Fox and Lucy Pinder or Leo DiCaprio. I had the cast of Hollyoaks.

The production sounds deliberately uncomfortable in places. How did you decide how far to push the audience without losing them?

The thought of losing the audience never really came into my mind. Actually, maybe I will lose some of them by the end. And I think that’s ok? I always want my work to feel uncomfortable, to be uneasy and confrontational. That risks alienation. I’ve been told before that my writing could be too affronting or too provocative and getting audiences on side is more important than pushing them away. But that alternative isn’t interesting to me. We (the gays) are raised to fear alienation, to seek acceptance, to be tolerable. I’d rather flip the switch on that narrative and make you squirm for once. 

Slugs explores desire and shame, but also asks who has the right to tell a story when it involves other people. Did writing the play make you think differently about your own responsibilities as a writer? 

I overthink everything. I can’t even write a text without thinking about whether I’m about to accidentally upset someone. Therefore, for better or worse, I am acutely aware of and fascinated by the repercussions of my playwriting. I write about my friends, my family, I write about people I’ve dated or snogged. I don’t have a horrible imagination, but I write best when I steal from my own life. With Slugs, there’s some phone calls I’ve made in advance, just to give some people a heads up. I do worry that someone I know is going to have that “wait is this fucking play about us?” (Euphoria, 2022) moment, but I think as time goes on, I am aware that ultimately my responsibility as a writer is to write the truth as I see it, because that’s when the work glows. 

You're performing material that's informed by your own life while also questioning the idea of autobiographical theatre. Does that create an unusual relationship with the audience each night?

It’s strange. It’s the first time I’ve done any kind of autobiographical theatre, and I share things in this show I’ve never shared with anyone before. That means every night I’m having to connect with a new audience in this vulnerable and kind of jarring way. And then yes, at the same time I want to question this form of theatre, and I want the audience to do the same. It means the relationship oscillates between trust and distrust, apathy and empathy and as a performer, that’s going to be an interesting atmosphere to navigate, and I think it’s an atmosphere that has the potential to change night by night. 

Are there any conventions of the one-person show that you were particularly keen to play with or undermine?

When I say I studied one-person shows, I mean it: Krapp's Last Tape up to Weather Girl and Baby Reindeer and Chewing Gum Dreams. I hadn’t initially planned on writing an autobiographical show until I took Bryony Kimming’s week-long workshop in autobiographical theatre-making. She is a total master of her craft, and getting to learn from her was a dream, and I picked up so many techniques to dramatise a real-life story. Ultimately the convention that I was most drawn to was the idea of the narrator, their reliability and their accountability. During the workshop, we were vulnerable and open with each other, and we were also telling stories that involved other people, painting them in certain lights. We see these one-sided stories told all the time in theatre, and I really wanted to see if it was possible to fracture the form itself whilst keeping it fully intact. When figuring out how this could be possible, I realised if I was going to be the only performer of this show, somehow the audience had to become a character. I didn’t want audience participation as such, because that’s my personal worst fear, but I worked out that they couldn’t just sit behind that invisible fourth wall. This is a play that can quite literally only work as a piece of theatre in front of a live audience.   

The brochure image of Slugs is grotesque, funny and strangely vulnerable all at once. Did you always know that would become the visual thread running through the show?

Ok I’ve had a few people say the image is hot and so I’m going to take grotesque as a huge compliment. That shoot day was so fun. I had our producer Patrick and our SFX artist Alice covering me in baby shampoo and hair gel whilst Lucas, the photographer, snapped away. I felt monstrous. It was brilliant. The show was always going to be about sex, and sex can be sexy and gross and funny and disgusting and strange all at once and so we always definitely wanted this to be the visual thread. So much of what I wrote was about that sensation of being sticky and slimy, and so we needed to be able to bring that alive in a visual way. I think even the title elicits some sensory response, and having the freedom to write all this sensory language with the knowledge that we’d actualise it and bring it to life has been pure fun. 

Slugs will be performed at 12:55pm at Pleasance Courtyard from 5^th-30^th August.

Booking link: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/slugs