Salvador Kent
A staple of Edinburgh grassroots theatre – Half Trick’s ‘irreverent adaptations of untouchable classics’ are always fun, smart and feature slick, committed performances. This year, they’re back at the Edinburgh Fringe with two works, their ‘fanfiction’ of Charlie and the Choclate Factory ‘Waiting for Wonka’ and what now must surely be a Cult Fringe hit back for its third year in a row in ‘The Faustus Project’; where a guest performer tackles Marlowe’s play in a frenzy of theatrical tortures every night. I sat down for a pixelated pint with artistic directors Caden Scott and Courtney Bassett to ask them about their double bill, fanfiction, cruelty and Half Trick’s goodbye for now…
You can catch Waiting for Wonka at 11:40 (60 mins) from 5th-16th August at Gilded Balloon Patter House (Dram). Tickets are available through the Gilded Ballon Online Box Office.
The Faustus Project will play at 21:05 (60 mins) from 17th-30th August at Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Laugh). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Salvador: How’s it going Half Trick?! You’re bringing two shows to EdFringe. What are they about? How’s the workload been?
Courtney & Caden: Waiting for Wonka is an unauthorized parody sequel to one of the most beloved children’s stories of all time. Veruca, Augustus, Violet, and Mike are all grown up and haunted by what happened to them on that fabled factory tour. Watched over by their new landlord, Charlie, they must grapple with the consequences of their childhood trauma.
The Faustus Project, returning from last year and hot off a five-star award-nominated jaunt to Brighton Fringe, is a version of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus which features a different guest every night taking on the lead role. They must face down the fiendish pranks, mind games, and challenges of a devilish ensemble, who have designed the show to be an actor’s worst nightmare and as difficult as possible to get through.
Salvador: How do you manage the workload of preparing two equally complex pieces of theatre?
Courtney & Caden: Luckily, both of these pieces have had a life before, so we’re not totally starting from scratch either time. Luckily, we’re also insane. It helps that Courtney directs Wonka and Caden directs Faustus, so we can split our brainpower across two separate lines. The shows have quite different requirements as well, Wonka needing more rehearsal and traditional production design, Faustus needing more risk assessments, guest liaison (shout out to our producer Ben Alborough) and ‘fuck around and find out’ energy. Our first time at Fringe in 2024, we also did two shows, alternating night-on night-off, and swiftly learned why most people don’t do that. This time, happily, we can finish one show off mid-month and switch gears to start the second one up. This is only our third year doing the festival, but you learn a lot in that short time.
Salvador: Chatting to Courtney last year, she described Waiting for Wonka as ‘fanfiction’. Is that label appropriate? Can fanfiction and theatre exist in a happy (or unhappy) marriage?
Courtney & Caden: We are firm believers that all adaptation (which comprises a lot of modern theatre), is fanfiction. A lot of the time, the difference between fanfiction and adaptation simply comes down to whether we consider it highbrow or lowbrow art. We hope to stage more fanfiction in the future. If anyone has a 20k+ word yuri problematic crackship they want acted out for them on stage, drop us a DM.
Salvador: Talk us through the writing process of Waiting for Wonka from inception through the staged reading, the 2025 production and to now. What’s changed. What’s changing, and why?
Courtney & Caden: Waiting for Wonka started as us making the five kids as adults in Sims 4, before we even had the idea of telling it as a play. Necessity put them all in the same flat, which we decided that Charlie, as new CEO, would have control over, so all the decor was purple and insane. It just seemed like a hostile place to live, and we realised pretty quickly we wanted to explore further. Then COVID happened, which gave us actually time to write it, though meant we had to hold off on staging it. One of the first things we did in Edinburgh after moving here was a staged reading at Voodoo Rooms – this was a huge leap of faith: we didn’t really know anyone, or how well our style would go down, but we put our best foot forward and people seemed to really dig it. We got straight on to getting a full staging in our season at Augustines in 2025 – the wonderful thing about the year-round emerging theatre scene in Edinburgh is you can get something on its feet fairly quickly and see what might work in a festival context from the feedback and support you receive – in this case a resounding chorus of ‘please bring this back!’
This new version is cut down to a lean Fringe-friendly 60 minutes, without sacrificing plot beats. It’s the same cast, same design, same vision, simply distilled. 99.44/100 % pure.
Salvador: Something I notice about both works is a sort of “cruelty” – not in an offputting way, Half Trick is a very generous company but both works contain cruelty – in Wonka, the (grown-up) children are cruel to each other, and in Faustus, the devils are cruel towards the guest performer. Is this something you play with consciously or subliminally?
Courtney & Caden: We get this a lot. In fact, we actively curate that image at times. But if anything, what defines our work is kindness, hope, and optimism. The texture of cruelty and darkness is necessary to provide soil for a lighter seed to grow. A common piece of writing advice is to test your characters, even your most beloved characters, by having the absolute worst thing happen to them, so they can grow and change. Also, the world can be a cruel place, and we don’t want to shy away from that. But we don’t want to make theatre that feels bad, that feels like a wound. We want to make theatre that is challenging, exhilarating, and people can walk away from with something to hold on to. Even in Faustus, which, it’s not a spoiler to say, ends with Faustus being dragged to hell. But our version, The Faustus Project, doesn’t end until our guest is standing before the audience in the curtain call, and the outpouring of support, screams and stamps and shouts, that feeling of “oh my god they did it!” is part of that show’s journey, and ultimately ends on an uplifting note, and it’s no coincidence that so many of our guests wish they could go through it all again. We’re not sure if it’s conscious or subliminal, it may be just that we’re big softies at heart.
But don’t tell anyone that, it’s our little secret. We have to keep up the facade of being dangerous, evil, scary, unpredictable, and wild, or the whole ‘hellraiser’ thing collapses. Yeah, we’re cruel. Cruel and horrible and we’re gonna get ya.
Salvador: Having two shows at different timeslots might naturally bring in different crowds – is that something you’re thinking about – who do you think would vibe with each show the most?
Courtney & Caden: Edinburgh Fringe is probably the only festival in the world where you can be performing a play at 11:40 AM every day and that’s considered a good timeslot. It must throw off a lot of first-timers. Both shows fit our core audience, people who want to be surprised with an unhinged twist on something familiar, and are a perfect way to either start or end a day at Fringe. Faustus audiences are more likely to be an impulse purchase, an on-the day type thing, but the wonderful thing about Faustus is that our guests come from all sorts of places and performance styles and will bring some of their core audience with them, so ultimately our audience demographic ranges quite wildly and people who might have never found us get to see the show. Some of them seem serious, straight-laced, sensible theatre-goers, and we get a little nervous that they’ll be put off, but 95% of the time as soon as the first prank happens they go absolutely wild. Faustus unlocks things in people that they never knew they had in them. If any Wonka audiences are this more sensible, straight-laced, pre-booking, schedule-following type, we will be tempting them to come take a walk on the wild side with Faustus the week after.
Salvador: After this Fringe, Half Trick are heading back to New Zealand. Howcomes? Any chance we might get a farewell?
Courtney & Caden: Our visas are expiring! His Majesty’s Government says you only get three years of us. But we will be back, after applying for new visas, and NZ is a good base to do all of that admin from, plus most of us haven’t been home in three years, so there’s family to see and childhood belongings to sell off.
We are having a one-off show as part of Bedlam Late called Right To Remain (30 August, 00.30, that’s midnight on the 29th). Inspired by crowdfunding, the commercialisation of theatre, and the power of community, the basic idea is that all four of us have to fundraise several thousand pounds each to pay the immigration surcharge, so for one night only, live on stage, we’re going to be doing anything, at all, for cash donations, and see how much we can raise. The venue has told us the only thing we’re not allowed to do is use glitter. This is our leaving party, of sorts. We hope our audience is 50% our friends and supporters, and 50% drunk, evil, rich people who will fund the night’s debauchery.
Salvador: With EdFringe now just around the corner, what are you most excited for?
Courtney & Caden: The 22 hours we have to spend in Malaga during tech week for visa reasons to avoid overstaying. Sun, sand, relaxing, not a flyer in sight.
Salvador: If your shows were beverages of any kind, what would they be and why?
Courtney & Caden: Waiting for Wonka is a nice tall glass of chocolate straight from the river (be careful… it must not be touched by human hands, so you have to pick it up with your mouth and throw your head back like a hands-free shot). Because you have to follow the rules.
The Faustus Project is a wine tasting of the seven bowls of God’s wrath: mouth ulcers, the death of all sea life, blood in the rivers, sun-fire, darkness, drought & earthquakes (Revelations 16.) Because this is what happens if you break the rules.
You can catch Waiting for Wonka at 11:40 (60 mins) from 5th-16th August at Gilded Balloon Patter House (Dram). Tickets are available through the Gilded Ballon Online Box Office.
The Faustus Project will play at 21:05 (60 mins) from 17th-30th August at Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Laugh). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Shay Mace
