Roe McDonnell
In 2024, Noah Xavier (they/them) first created ‘Brick’ as part of a college assignment. Now in 2026 this play makes its Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut with the guiding hand of the Boondog Theatre Company team as the winner of their inaugural Fringe mentoring scheme. Roe spoke to Noah to find out more about the play, their process and taking a show up so early in their career.
You can catch Brick at studio at C ARTS | C venues | C aurora on August 5th-30th from 16:15 (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Roe: Hey Noah, can you give me a synopsis of Brick?
Noah: Brick is the story of a young man named James who gets arrested after throwing a brick at a police officer during a queer rights protest. It takes place entirely within a holding cell over the course of one night. Essentially he gets put in there with this other unnamed and unconscious cellmate who he develops this sort of strange, almost parasocial relationship with and begins to just sort of divulge his life story to and you sort of see all of the events in his life that have led him here.
Roe: Tell me a bit about your theatre journey.
Noah: My brother grew up having music lessons and so my mum needed me to go somewhere for like an hour and a half on a Saturday morning and plopped me into a drama class thing and then I just really enjoyed it and I refused to stop. Especially as I was like going through my teenagers and like discovering things about myself and not necessarily conforming to sort of gender stereotypes and like neurotypical stereotypes, to have part of my day where I could go and do something where everything was planned and I knew what I was going to say, I knew who I was in that moment.
I went to college in the middle of Nottingham for it, and then applied to drama school. I actually started writing Brick while I was applying and now I’ve just finished my 2nd year. But unfortunately means that I’m gonna finish Edinburgh, come back on the 1st of September and then I’m back in Liverpool for my 3rd year on the 7th of September!
Roe: What was your inspiration going into writing this piece? (Events of the time, movements, people, etc.)
Noah: It was the school strike stuff that was my first introduction to protesting around 2019. But I really took it seriously with the Pro-Palestine matches in Nottingham after October 7th. I had this feeling of wanting to do more and not really having any way to. There were a couple of other things as well. I went to Pride in June and I remember there was a police presence there. This moment is actually in the play, I remember looking and seeing that the police were facing us like they were protecting the Christian hecklers from us and not the other way around.
That was a massive thing that made me start to figure out who the institutions are protecting. Then there’s also been a lot of other movements especially in nottingham and around Sarah Everard and watching those happen also got me thinking about the institutions that are directly responsible through this chain of command for these things happening because they’re not protecting the right people.
Roe: What was your writing/devising process like?
Noah: I originally made a 30 minute version of the play for one of my final projects at college. I didn’t have a script at all for around 4 months, just ideas. There was a lot of research and I think one thing that I wanted to really make sure of, especially when I was expanding the play out to be the full hour, is that the majority of the things that happen in the play are things that happened, not to one person but a mixture of loads of different things like news articles that I was reading about thinking how can I include that and weave these sorts of themes into it?
A lot of the devising process for the Fringe run was focusing on how the show is in a very small space and when we were getting it on his feet was about how can we make this dynamic? How can we make this small space seem interesting?
Roe: What’s your favourite line in the show and why?
Noah: The 1st word of the show is ‘Fuck’ which I really like, just a full effect of his brain. There’s a couple of others on the more serious times, there’s a line about someone called Fred Hampton. who was the leader of the Black Panther Party, and the line is about how ‘there are bullet marks on Fred Hampton’s grave’ because the Chicago police killed him and every year on the anniversary of his death, they would go and shoot his grave which is horrifying. And I think my other favourite line is right near the end and it is ‘They probably unload the dishwasher differently’. which doesn’t really make any sense, but it does to me.
Roe: How does queerness and neurodiversity shape the art you create?
Noah: It’s in everything that I do. There’s a lens of looking at the world differently and from outside of certain structures. I think deconstructing gender norms and hetero-patriarchal structures has definitely changed how I see every societal structure but there’s a degree of privilege in something like, in like queerness and neurodivergent because they are some of the time, not necessarily visible differences and I’m privileged to live in a part of the world where it is legal – for the moment – to be queer and I think seeing the way that it affects me and the people around me, really informs the way that I write about identity. Even though James is a certified he/him I think that there’s a sense of being ignored or being let down or being left to fend to yourself. It’s not an autobiographical play.
But in the same sense every play is in some sense autobiographical for the writer because they wrote it. There are some bits of it that I’m like, oh, I wrote this because I was struggling with drama school auditions that were almost directly tied to the institutions and the elitism in drama school editions and it will sort of blend from you into the character, and especially because I’m playing James. No one taught me how to be queer and neurodivergent. And James is finding out about the world that he lives in and how, how the personal and the political have always been intertwined, whether he has been aware of it or not and that definitely mirrors coming into my own understanding of myself and the world around me.
Roe: Audiences would love the play if they love this: TV Show, Movie and Play
TV Show: I’ve got two. ‘I May Destroy You’. Um, which is Michaela Cole’s TV show, I’m just obsessed with and a show that I watched recently, ‘This Is Going to Hurt’ the Adam McKay show about the NHS. With both of those, there’s a real, institutional failure feel and how it sort of seeps into your personal life
Movie: I’ve got two again. Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’. It was a real cultural moment when it came out, but like that kind of intimacy really comes through. There’s another film called ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’. Bunch of kids blowing up a pipeline, an oil pipeline that’s running through indigenous land.
Play: I’ve got to say ‘Punch’ it made me bawl my eyes out. The first time I did the half hour version of Brick, was the same day that I saw the press night for Punch. ‘Angels in America’ another one and I’ll say ‘Prima Facie’ and the ‘Death of England’ monologues
Roe: What’s your experience been like working with the Boondog team on their mentorship scheme
Noah: It’s been awesome. Doing Edinburgh fringe was such a pipe dream when I first conceived of this show and I’m so unbelievably excited. I couldn’t have done it without them. Jamie and Lucy have both been just incredible, so lovely and supportive. They’ve made the logistics and production elements so much easier, which has really allowed me to focus on the actual performance of the show. Making it as easy as making a Fringe show can be which is still not easy, but it’s it’s been such a brilliant help just to have both of them on board to, to be able to text them at 2 in the morning panicking about something and full of reassurance.
Roe: Anything else you want to talk about?
Noah: I just want to say that the first Fringe was a protest. In 1947, 8 theatre companies turned up unannounced to the Edinburgh International Festival because the Edinburgh International Festival had this focus on ‘high art’, whatever that means, and also banned Scottish theatre companies from participating. They turned up and performed as a form of resistance and staged the shows anyway. And as much as Fringe has become a more of a sort of consumerist entity, I think it is, um, I think it’s, it’s, I think I want people. I just want people to know. I just want people to remember that.
A reminder, you can catch Brick at studio at C ARTS | C venues | C aurora on August 5th-30th from 16:15 (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Pascol
Shay Mace
