Shay Mace
Bringing a personal story to the stage as mother and daughter, Marta McIlduff and Alessandra Celesia in their upcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe show ALIENS. The piece follows a road trip from Donegal to southern Italy, as they weave their personal stories with those of Italian immigrants in Northern Ireland. Putting together performance, video, archive testimony and live electronic music, the duo meet present-day migrants, activists and strangers along the route, asking who gets to draw the lines between us and them. We caught up with the duo for a pixelated pint to unpack the show and their stories.
You can catch ALIENS at Main House at ZOO Southside on August 18th – 30th (not the 24th) from 16:20 (90mins). Tickets are available through the ZOO Online Box Office.
Shay: Hi Marta and Alessandra, tell us about ALIENS and why you have decided to bring this very personal story to the stage now?
Marta: ALIENS is mother and daughter on a road trip from Donegal to southern Italy, weaving our personal stories with those of Italian immigrants in Northern Ireland and present-day migrants, activists and strangers we met along the way. At its core it’s a show about borders. The border between us: mother and daughter, once nonexistent, once one body; her milk, my food; her breath, my air. The Catholic and Protestant divisions in Belfast that my Irish grandparents navigated when they fell in love, the border between North and South of Ireland that seemed to vanish overnight, the barbed-wire fences between Dover and Calais, these lines drawn in sand and stone. We are fascinated by what crosses between them: people, insects, bacteria exchanged in a kiss between supposed opposites, all the in-betweeners like ourselves: the Aliens.
Alessandra: In a time increasingly defined by violent divisions, as we have been sadly reminded of in Belfast recently with the racist riots that happened, we believe it’s important to tell stories of intercultural relations that foster a sense of solidarity and compassion, which is why we want to bring ALIENS to the stage now.
Shay: How has the creative process been of putting the show together? Give us an idea of the journey you’ve been on with it so far.
Alessandra: The idea for the show originated from our discovery of a forgotten and tragic chapter of history: in 1941, the bodies of Italian immigrants washed ashore on Donegal beaches for an entire summer. They had been living in Northern Ireland for decades, running ice cream shops and fish-and-chip counters, when Mussolini’s alliance with Germany saw them classified as “enemy aliens” and interned. Over 400 died when the Arandora Star was torpedoed en route to a Canadian prison camp. Almost no one remembers them. I spent a decade interviewing the descendants of those families, collecting stories of migration and identity that are tender and violent. We decided to embark on a road trip from those beaches. Marta was born in Belfast and raised between France and Italy, and when she started asking her own questions about rising nationalism in Europe, we decided to make the show together.
Marta: We fought. We laughed. It was amazing – but this is the last show we’ll ever do together!
Shay: What will be the first thing the audience sees, feels, and hears as they enter the space?
Marta: The stage itself is a laboratory, an active space of discovery and storytelling. A table sits in the corner, cluttered with laptops, microphones, papers, and cameras, the tools we use to build and reveal the story in real time. At the back of the stage, a projection screen stretches from floor to ceiling. The bodies on stage and on the screen merge to create a “live movie.” The electronic musician on stage with us creates a live score, blending field recordings with textured electronic music: the whisper of wind along the Donegal coast, the clink of a coffee cup in a roadside café.
Shay: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?
Alessandra: The term alien, once used by the British and Irish governments, is a stark reminder of how language can dehumanize. In the USA it has been recycled again recently in a horrific “aliens map” referring to the people arrested by ICE. One of the people we met on our journey told us that as a child, when registering monthly with the Alien Department as an Italian in Ireland, he overheard the officer call for “the alien.” He put two fingers behind his head, imitating antennae, and joked, “My spaceship is waiting outside.” This small act of humour is a powerful form of resistance – reappropriating the term alien into something playful, blurring boundaries, and creating space for something new. ALIENS embraces this hybridity, offering a story that moves past binaries: self/other, native/foreigner, belonging/exclusion. It invites the audience to cross borders with us, exploring what exists in between.
Shay: What journey has the show been on to find itself at EdFringe 2026?
Marta: It’s been a long road together, the show really digs into our life and relationship, so I guess in a way it started the day I was born, in everything that built our bond as mother and daughter. Then there were ten years of interviews with the descendants of the Italian families, and the road trip. We’ve performed it in Italy and at Dublin Fringe, where we won the Beyond Borders Award, but we weren’t sure whether we’d be able to bring it to EdFringe. In the end the stars aligned, so we’re very excited to arrive at ZOO Southside as part of Aurora Nova 2026, especially since I’ve seen some of my favourite shows ever at ZOO Southside, so it feels a little like a dream come true.
Shay: With EdFringe now just around the corner, what are you most excited for?
Marta: I worked for five years as front of house at Summerhall during EdFringe, so to come back this time with a show of my own feels really exciting! I’m also really looking forward to catching as many shows as I can, it’s such a rare chance to have so much brilliant international work all in one place.
Alessandra: I’m really looking forward to bringing ALIENS to audiences. I’m excited to open up a space where we can stand together, mothers and daughters, against the rising rhetoric around migration and belonging, a rhetoric that echoes old divisions and brings back the same language and fears. I’m looking forward to putting the show in front of an audience for whom that urgency is very present. I’m also looking forward to spending time with my daughter!
Shay: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind, what would it be and why?
Both: An Irish coffee. Coffee is a very Italian thing, whiskey a very Irish one, so it’s the most Irish-Italian drink we can think of.
A reminder, you can catch ALIENS at Main House at ZOO Southside on August 18th – 30th (not the 24th) from 16:20 (90mins). Tickets are available through the ZOO Online Box Office.
Image Credit: Diego Pallu
Salvador Kent
