Shows on the Rise at VAULT Festival 2018: WIND BIT BITTER BIT BIT BIT HER by cough//drop

The VAULT Festival is coming to town! From January 24th to March 18th, over three hundred new shows explode across a festival of festivals in their Waterloo home. With new venues, new bars, new food and plenty of surprises, VAULT 2018 is the biggest, fairest platform in London for artists to present innovative, daring work. Here we catch up with Sami from cough//drop to find out a little bit more about their VAULT offering.

WIND BIT BITTER, BIT BIT BIT HER is a nice little tongue-twister. And, with a bit of luck, that convoluted title sums the whole show up: playful, twisting and maybe a little bit twisted. WBB,BBBH (the acronym isn’t any easier to get your tongue around) is a monologue, set sometime in the future, about a couple who have lost their child. But what starts as a the fragile interior monologue of a woman falling out of love slowly morphs into a paranoid conspiracy. As disembodied arms and hands and feet are washed up on the shore near Mary’s house, an idea starts to form: maybe her child isn’t so dead after all.

The piece was written over the last year on Soho Theatre’s (brilliant) writing course. It began life as a simple story of a couple coping with grief. But the more I started to develop the character of Mary, the more she took over – and, eventually, all other characters were eaten up by her. So the piece became a monologue, stuck inside the frantic brain of this frail, angry, deluded character. And suddenly, ideas about strange conspiracies and science-gone- wrong – which seemed so ludicrous when contained in dialogue – just started to make perfect sense as part of a monologue. Hopefully, WIND BIT BITTER, BIT BIT BITTER captures that frantic, desperate desire to believe in conspiracies – while also trapping its audience in the strange mind of Mary.

Performing at VAULT 2018 is genuinely a really exciting prospect. I applied on a whim, I thought it was a bit of a long-shot, but when the offer came through, I realised what an great opportunity it is to get the piece out there. I always get frustrated when I’m not able to get something I’ve written up on a stage, so it’s really fantastic to breathe life into this piece so soon after finishing it. Plus, getting to perform it alongside a load of other brilliant, daring shows is always a bonus.

WIND BIT BITTER, BIT BIT BIT HER is running from the 24th-28th of January at the VAULT Theatre is Waterloo. Tickets and more information can be found here.