Salvador Kent
Theatre 118 was a hub of cultural activity in Glasgow until its sudden closure at the end of 2025. Now, Artistic Director David Hewitson produces multi-hyphenate artist Louis Utieyin’s debut Fringe show Diary of a DL Trade. A form bending, irreverent piece of theatre, it has a really impressive central performance from Louis. I sat down for a pixelated pint with David and Louis to discuss grassroots theatre, their form-bending play and crashing on your mate’s floor.
You can catch Diary of a DL Trade from 8-18 August at Room 1 at PBH’s Free Fringe @ Carbon. The show starts at 17.55 (runtime one hour). It’s a Free Fringe show, so just show up! But as always Pay What You Want at the end. Here’s the show on the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Salvador: Hey team! Diary of a DL Trade has been in the works for some time now. Louis – how did the work start? David – when did you join?
Louis: It started about two years ago. I’m a stand-up comedian, and I’d always wanted to make a full hour because I wanted to challenge myself — but I didn’t want to do it the classic route, where you go into a comedy club and do an hour of disjointed jokes and then talk about stuff. I’m a theatre kid at heart, so I wanted to merge the play with the stand-up, and with the other three thousand things I love. At the end of the day it’s all theatre — improv, sketch, all of it — but you rarely see them come together in one piece. You see it in music: an artist makes an album and there’s an EDM track and then an R&B track. I wanted to make something like that, but for theatre. Something for the neurospicy people like me who need to be stimulated constantly. I won’t lie, at the beginning it was a mess.
David: I came on board when Louis was doing an R&D at Capital Theatres. He invited me along initially just to assist and hang out, but we had a really good experience with that R&D and we both felt the show could go further, so Louis kindly invited me back. What excited me was that it plays with form. It’s telling a powerful, emotive story, but it’s using the language of stand-up, of theatre, of music and poetry to come at that story from different angles. That appeals to me as a fan of total theatre — like Louis says about the album. I think theatre is at its most interesting when it brings different art forms and styles into one experience.
Salvador: The work is form-bending – is there a particular reason why you feel inclined to mix poetry, stand-up, music, and rap? How do these things combine?
Louis: It’s a one-person show, and I’d been watching a lot of one-person shows — Fleabag, the stuff Michaela Coel and Whoopi Goldberg were doing — and I thought, this is cool, but let me reimagine it again. So I started adding things in. But they have to be cohesive, and I hope people can see in the show that I’m not just throwing things at the wall. It’s like music: a lot of genres are connected at the root, and I think a lot of theatrical forms are connected in the same way. You can make a spoken word theatre show that lands as hard as Hamlet — it’s about the writing, and about how you play with the forms and then connect them. Telling the story through diaries was the link that let us devise around it. And that’s before you even get to sound design, which our technician Mark pointed out to us is a story in itself.
David: There’s another important part to this, which is that we’re both neurodivergent. I think that’s reflected in the show — there’s a need for constant variety. I’ve sat in stand-up shows checking the clock.
Louis: Exactly. If you see me doing something, it’s usually because I haven’t seen it done before. Rather than wait for someone else to make it, I’ll go and make it.
David: It’s the kind of theatre we want to exist.
Salvador: What draws you to tell this story now? Is it autobiography?
Louis: It’s not strictly autobiography — and if you watch the show and see the ending, I’m playing a character, because the real me would have left that situation. I think there’s a beauty and a sadness in being a diaspora queer kid, because you can start again. If I’d been born and raised in Nigeria, I can see how I might have ended up like the character. Being in Europe, it’s still racist as hell, but you don’t have to stay in the same spaces as homophobic family members. I selfishly named the character after myself, but if it were actually me in that family I’d have done things differently. What I do know is that someone is going through this — I’ve heard the stories, especially from people in African communities. I’m very conscious I’m bringing this show to a place where those people won’t be in the room. They’re probably not looking for theatre shows; they’re trying to figure out how to stay in this country. But you have to start somewhere. And we need more diverse stories across the board, especially in the Trump-land we’re living in right now.
David: What draws me to it is that it sits at the intersection of so many things. It’s an intersection of forms — poetry, stand-up, theatre, drama, music — but it’s also an intersection of cultures. Louis’s Nigerian heritage, being queer, living in Scotland, being Glaswegian. All of that meeting in one show is what interests me.
Salvador: Louis puts in such a brave performance in this work. How did you develop it?
Louis: I didn’t go to drama school or study creative writing — I got rejected. But I grew up in church, and I’d argue that’s more intensive than four years at the Royal Conservatoire. The writing came out of years of doing stand-up gigs and then widening the story out from there. It actually started with a title. I’d been a flyerer for years and I’d always wanted to do a Fringe show, and for me the title is a big thing. My friend Hitesh — who’s since been deported back to India, shout out to the Home Office — looked at a list of options I’d written, some of them outrageous, and said Diary of a DL Trade was the good one. From there I developed the story. Then it was Capital Theatres, then the rehearsal period, and it went from something that genuinely did not make sense to something I feel comfortable explaining to people. Two years, I won’t lie.
David: Louis is the writer, but the process has been heavily improvisational. The script is something we’ve been hashing out orally in the rehearsal room — as we rehearse it we’re writing it, changing it. It’s much closer to how stand-up gets developed than how most plays do.
Louis: Most plays arrive as a script and the work is blocking and finding character motives. This didn’t. That’s why it’s experimental at its core. It is a play, don’t get it twisted — but we didn’t get here the traditional way.
Salvador: What will be the first thing the audience sees, feels, and hears as they enter the space?
David: The first thing they’ll notice is that we’re doing this at Carbon, Room One — and Carbon is a nightclub. It’s informal, the show is a bit makeshift, and to me that’s the true spirit of the Fringe. It’s the Free Fringe, so there’ll be tons of other shows on simultaneously and it’ll be a bit chaotic, but I think what people will feel is that this has been made with love and a kind of homemade spirit and presented in an informal environment. One of my heroes is David MacLennan, who founded A Play, A Pie and A Pint. What he was going for in that basement was informality — the sense you could turn up casually, that it wasn’t a night out at the theatre where you had to dress up or put on airs. This is a down-to-earth, working-class story, and we hope audiences feel comfortable in a nightclub space, because the space reflects the show.
Louis: Everything about this is going the opposite way, right down to the venue. Pony Boy did a nightlife theatre experience recently and I thought, yes — that’s the kind of thing I want to make. If this work gets iterated, I want it in club nights. I’m very conscious that theatre isn’t just a middle class thing, it’s also an older thing, and the kids are on TikTok or they’re in the club. There has to be a conscious effort from grassroots companies to make work that actually invites young audiences in. Theatre isn’t dead — with AI and everything else, it’s only going to get bigger. But you have to be up to date with the streets. A lot of theatre people are still making theatre like it’s 2004. Can we make theatre for 2026? Diary of a DL Trade is 2026.
Salvador: If you could change one thing about making grassroots theatre in Scotland, what would you change? Does the show make a stride towards changing it?
David: The number one thing I’d change is who gets to make the work and who gets to see the work. Too often the people making theatre, or being exposed to it, or participating in it, tend to be more well-off, more predominantly white and middle class. I firmly believe theatre belongs to all of society, and grassroots theatre is one way we can put on work outside the mainstream. But grassroots theatre has its own problems, because if you’re making a show without funding, where nobody’s getting paid — and we’re not really being paid for this Fringe run — that excludes anyone with caring responsibilities, or who can’t afford the travel or the accommodation. We’re only able to do this because of a few very helpful factors: we’re Glasgow-based, we can get affordable travel to Edinburgh, and we know people whose floor we can crash on. These are systemic things that shut people out of making theatre, not just at the Fringe but year-round. If you can’t afford to hire a rehearsal room or a venue, it’s very hard to make grassroots work. So I hope what we’re doing shows that theatre can be made by people from different walks of life, and that there are creative solutions to the things that block us.
Louis: That’s everything I was going to say. I’d add that the Fringe started this way — it started because the Festival was so closed off — and now it’s becoming the exact problem it was created to solve. Unless you’re a rich kid from London who fancies Edinburgh in August. And it’s in Scotland, but there aren’t nearly enough Scottish acts. Either there’s a shake-up like the one 60-odd years ago, or something breaks. Big shout out to the Free Fringe for the venue and the support, because we genuinely wouldn’t be able to do this otherwise.
Salvador: With EdFringe kicking off in under a week (argh!), what are you most excited for?
Louis: When I first started this I had that thing a lot of artists have, where you want everything at once. Honestly though, if I can do these ten days with the same consistency and energy we had in the R&D in Glasgow, improving each time, that’s it. I didn’t go to drama school — I got rejected — so I’m seeing the Fringe a bit like that: I get to do the thing for ten days, and you can only learn. I don’t know how people do a full month, but shout out to them. Having a director like David, who actually gives me notes, keeps me grounded, because I hate when people just say “that was good, that was good.” Tell me what wasn’t. I’m not perfect and I never will be. Even if it’s one or two people in the room, I want to give the energy and come out of those ten days a better performer.
David: I’m excited to see real audiences watch the show. No offence to everyone who’s seen it so far, but they’re mostly theatre directors. I’ve had enough industry feedback — I want to know what actual people make of it, ideally people who’ve never been to a theatre show before. It’s a very weird, very unconventional show, so I’m just intrigued.
Salvador: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?
David: A Slush Puppie. It’s sweet, it’s sour, it’s slightly infantile, and it’s fun.
Louis: IRN Bru, if you’re reading this, we are available for sponsorship.
It was a pleasure to catch up with David and Louis. A reminder, you can catch Diary of a DL Trade from 8-18 August at Room 1 at PBH’s Free Fringe @ Carbon. The show starts at 17.55 (runtime one hour). It’s a Free Fringe show, so just show up! But as always Pay What You Want at the end. Here’s the show on the EdFringe Online Box Office.
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Nicole Gulasekharam
