“Lydia and I spent hundreds of hours talking before a word hit the page.”
WHO: Lydia Free & Coco Cottam
WHAT: “Four people enter a sauna, three walk out. Over an hour, a group of strangers get hotter and hotter. So hot, they start to cook. Coco Cottam’s new play Thermodrama measures the costs of a culture of self-improvement on four precarious lives. Following a sell-out run of BLANDY – ‘Riotous, visceral and whip-smart’ ***** (BingeFringe.com) – Lovelock Productions have taken a room in Summerhall and are going to make it sizzle.”
WHERE: Old Lab at Summerhall (Venue 26)
WHEN: 22:30 (60 min)
MORE: Click Here!
Is this your first time to Edinburgh?
No! Thermodrama is our second time at Edinburgh Fringe as a company, following our run of BLANDY at Assembly last August. And we are so excited to be back for 2026. We absolutely love the Fringe, meeting new audiences and artists, and the festival’s unique ability to place the weirdest and wackiest juxtaposition of plays, shows, and acts in the same room across a twenty-four hour period. This year, our space is double the capacity of last year’s so we’re excited to tackle the new challenge!
What are the big things you’ve learned since 2025 and have you absorbed any of the lessons yet?
Coco has just finished MA Creative Writing at the University of Oxford: “Over the last year, I’ve been writing a spec screenplay alongside this play. It’s expanded my ideas about the ways of telling a story – I think more visually and structurally than I used to. It’s also the first play we’ve intensively workshopped. We cast the play before I started writing. Lydia and I spent hundreds of hours talking before a word hit the page. That process of developing the play with Lydia and the actors has been invaluable. We’ve gone much further into the borders of the play, some of the many versions of the play that could be. The text I have discarded, the stories that in other drafts would be forgotten, has been metabolised by the actors. Their characters contain all the trials and errors, all the other plays contained within ‘Thermodrama’ on stage. That’s new to me and cool to watch.”
Lydia is halfway through her MA Theatre Directing at Birkbeck: “I’m always on the job. I feel like this project has been an especially learning-heavy process for me and Coco as artists and collaborators. We have gone about this process with a story/character first, and text-second approach. It has been fascinating and energising to build the play around the actors and their contributions in the workshop space before we went into rehearsals. Mine and Coco’s relationship as writer and director is constantly evolving, and I feel like this year, we have scaled up on our symbiosis as the boundary between Coco’s work ending and mine beginning has become increasingly and welcomingly blurred.”
Tell us about your show.
Thermodrama is written by Coco Cottam, and is jointly produced by her and co-head of Lovelock, Lydia Free, who is directing the play We also have the fantastic James Newbery back on the team this year as our Associate Producer. The company came out of making lots of theatre at uni together (normally written by Coco!) and we have been making theatre and film ever since.
Edinburgh Fringe will be the premiere of Thermodrama, and we are so excited for the Fringe audience to be the first eyes on the piece. There is a lot of dialogue about wellness, biohacking, mortality, and wider society’s relationship with the manosphere (thank you, Mr Theroux), especially at this year’s festival. We are keen for Thermodrama to keep develop this debate with our audiences. Let’s chat about it!
We aim to have a homecoming for Thermodrama in London, and we are always keen to explore more options! Get/Keep in touch!
What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?
We have to mention James Grieve’s sauna in the Summerhall Courtyard downstairs. Although Thermodrama grapples with the flaws of wellness culture, we are massively intrigued by the possibilities of an eighty-person sauna-theatre. Like theatre, the sauna has traditionally been seen as a space for improvement. The difference in effect between their immersive storytelling and our expressionistic set will be an interesting one.
Speaking of our show, you will love our Camilla Anvar who plays Sophie. Camilla is also playing in The Wreck at 10:30AM in the Old Lab (yes, ante-meridian. Bear in mind our play is at 10:30 post-meridian…again in the Old Lab). We love Buzzcut and their live-cinema work is really cool, and obviously we think Camilla is great.
Some more things we are excited for: HotCat’s dance-theatre show Stop Playing Jacob’s Ladder With My Spine, Maybe You Like It’s Whatever Happened to that Guy? will be brilliant, as will Kick It Anywhere’s The Jolly Fisherman at Underbelly.
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