“The first Fringe I did was probably the best week of my life – it was so intense, and just a life goal to perform comedy in front of a paying audience.”
WHO: Mackenzie Galbraith
WHAT: “An inept lawyer, his strait-laced girlfriend, a Dutch polymath, two sock puppets and an asylum owner walk into a castle. What could go wrong? When the not-at-all sinister Countess Gagula and her manservant Igor invite Jonathan Harker to help with… “acquisitions”, he and his gang find themselves thrust into a battle between good and as much evil as we can pull off under a 12+ age rating. Gagula: The Panto with Teeth! is a 50-minute romp through Victorian Europe, packed with jokes, blood and audience participation! It’s Dracula. It’s pantomime. What more could you want?”
WHERE: Willow Studio at Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16)
WHEN: 11:40 (50 min)
MORE: Click Here!
Is this your first time to Edinburgh?
As a company, this is our second Fringe, but for me personally, it is my fifth Fringe bringing a show and sixth visiting.
My first visit to the Fringe was what sold me on comedy writing as both a pastime and as a career path. Just being sat in the backroom of a church seeing a comedian I vaguely recognised from the radio with such a varied group of people and laughing – and thinking, yeah, this is probably what I want to do with my life.
The scale of the Fringe, the absolute variety of it, and the platform it provides to smaller acts and companies is what makes it so special, along with the fact that it is such a historically storied event – it commands a lot of cultural capital and there is something very cool about telling people that you are doing the Fringe festival.
Even if you are only doing your show for ten people, it truly legitimises you as a creative – and you’re experiencing that in a city that swells to 3x its population across hundreds of venues and thousands of shows from early morning to midnight.
The first Fringe I did was probably the best week of my life – it was so intense, and just a life goal to perform comedy in front of a paying audience. Out from 9am, doing two shows, seeing comedy, theatre and music in places that wouldn’t normally be showing them and then going out to a bar or a club, stumbling home at 3am and then doing it all again. I remember my voice was so hoarse that by the end of the week, I couldn’t speak to anybody because I couldn’t be heard.
The thing about the Fringe is that everyone does it completely differently – that might be my experience, people might come in for one or two big ticket shows or go back-to-back all day. Everyone can engage with it and experience the Fringe in their own way, and that’s so special.
What are the big things you’ve learned since 2025 and have you absorbed any of the lessons yet?
Always have a show concept before you have a show name – as a writer, it’s much easier to write when you know what the general idea of the play is rather than trying to make something fit a pun that you thought of.
Crucially, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
12 months ago, I was writing, directing, producing and acting in a show, and trying to move house with a broken phone. Main lesson: never do that again.
Make sure your tech isn’t submitting her Masters thesis and also moving house two days before the show.
Make sure your actors are full of cold medicine – if one of them gets the flu, they all get the flu.
So, yes, give yourself as much time as you can to fix things when problems arise – because they will, and it is almost always things you would never had anticipated.
Otherwise:
Always start early.
50 minutes is an evil time slot. As a writer, yes, unfortunately, you do have to cut things.
Have a scary producer who can make colour coded schedules and spreadsheets – and, crucially, knows where you live. Healthy fear is a good motivator. (Producer’s note: I am nice, promise <3)
Basically, last year was for figuring things out. This year was for doing all the things I wish I had done last year (correctly).
Have we truly absorbed any lessons? Questionable.
P.S. yes, we do understand that by saying that we have learned from our mistakes of last year and that things are now more or less fine, something is about to go dramatically wrong… come see the show to see what that is, hopefully we don’t have to Weekend at Bernie’s an actor.
We do have fun, promise.
Tell us about your show.
After the most tumultuous Fringe run, possibly of all time (not to be exaggerated), I (the writer) vowed that I would never do the Fringe ever again. Then my mum asked me, over dinner, what’s next? I said no, not doing it again.
And yet.
Immediately post cast party and show celebration, like a paladin receiving visions from an angry god, the idea of Dracula but it’s a pantomime came to me.
I started to pace around our (writer and producer) living room (like I am doing now, whilst my producer types this all down), and after two hours of walking, talking and generally shaking my head and gnashing my teeth, the concept for Gagula was born.
A month and a half and a full read of Bram Stoker’s Dracula later, we had a full script. And here we are now, I guess.
The main idea for the show is what if Dracula were a pantomime dame, and every time she bit someone, they became a panto character too. It’s a fun, heightened, farcical version of Bram Stoker’s text, lovingly hacked into a 50 minute time slot that just gets bigger, and weirder, and sillier as the show goes on. There are sock puppets, all the gags you’d expect from a classic panto, fake teeth, a pop up coffin and a bag of 1000 communion wafers.
Pig’s Ear sort of came out of a successful Fringe done under another blanket – the Mermaids Performing Arts Fund through the University of St Andrews, where most of the Production Team met. We thought why not give it a go, it’ll be a bit of fun. We are still a relatively new company, but independently, all of the cast and all the creatives involved have a lot of theatre experience, and most have Fringe experience which makes it great to experience as a group.
I’ve done five Fringes – three years of improv comedy with Blind Mirth, and this is my third written show that is going up. It is still just as terrifying every single time – but that’s what makes it worth doing, and that’s what makes it fun (apparently).
This is Leia’s (our producer’s) second Fringe as a producer, second show with the company and third Fringe show on the Production Team. She is also moonlighting as our technician, costumer and makeup artist, among other things.
This show is premiering at the Fringe and we would love to scale it up in the future – whether that be stay in Edinburgh, and scale up to bigger theatres, do a longer run at the Fringe in the future or similar. Obviously it would be a dream to tour the show, or translate it into a (not so) short film. There is also always the nearly 2 hour version of the script…
There’s a lot in there that people are going to enjoy and get a lot out of, and I would like it to be seen by as many people as possible.
We think it’s good fun, we hope you will too!
What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?
Generally, we’d say catch the interestingly large amount of other Dracula inspired shows at Fringe this year, seems there has been a bit of a hive mind formed…
Other than that, you should totally go see:
Moving On: A New Musical – a new musical by Happy Sad Productions, who recently put on an amazing production of Spamalot at Portobello Town Hall so we’re excited to see what they’re doing next (you may also have seen one of our cast as one of their immensely talented featured dancers)
Waiting for Wonka – this is being directed by our fantastic intimacy and fight co-ordinator, so we think it’s pretty self explanatory why we’d love you to go and see this one!
A Brief History of Musical Theatre – featuring our multi-talented publicist, the executive PT took a little group trip to see the company’s production of Footloose at the end of last year – if the quality of that was anything to go by, this should be an amazing show!
The PowerPop Girls: A New Diva Religion – put the word camp in your show description and we’re there.
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