Lorna-Rose Treen will be performing 24 Hour Diner People at Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath) from 30th July – 24th August. Ticket link HERE. We sat down with Lorna-Rose to discuss her upcoming performance.
If your diner characters could place one item on a jukebox that defines them, what song would be playing on repeat?
I’ve been listening to Breakfast in America by Supertramp a lot. Not only is the diner aesthetic there on the album cover, with the strained smiling waitress holding her tray of OJ, but it’s also a song my Dad used to play me in his car when I was little, and I think all my characters lean into this nostalgic unreal world that exists in my brain.
What’s the weirdest item you’d actually serve at the 24 Hour Diner if it were real – and which character would insist on ordering it?
I imagine they all only drink black coffee and whenever they order anything else it comes as black coffee. Like open up a burger bun and it leaks black coffee.
Your characters are chaotic, surreal, and hilariously heartfelt – which one surprised you the most as it developed?
I’m quite surprised by how people resonate to this teenager character I play who’s just had her first kiss. I think there’s an unmined and untapped conversation around girl hood in society, and I’m starting to explore that. I was such a ratty pre-teen, and I think more of us were feral at that age than we have admitted to and this should be praised.
If Skin Pigeon was your surreal starter and 24 Hour Diner People is the main course, what’s the absurd dessert you’re dreaming up next?
I have no idea. I’d like to make a striped back show, and so would my producers also like me to do that.
You’ve said the diner is “a fantasy Americana” seen through Midlands eyes – what’s the most Midlands thing you’ve accidentally Americanized?
So much culture of mine growing up in 00s midlands was knock-off pound shop Americana. Like, the Chicago Rock Cafe, Harvard College sweaters from Redditch Primark, all our cool words like ‘dude’ and ‘rad’, Frankie and Bennies, listening to Green Day, surf culture (in the west midland – the only thing we were surfing was the spaghetti junction)… so I think I’m a weird hybrid of all of this ‘cool’ America stuff I got from TV…
I think the most brummy thing I’ve tried to get away with in the show is using the word Wotsits rather than Cheetos. It doesn’t sit right in my mouth.
What’s one trope or type of woman you’re still desperate to give a ridiculous voice and monologue to – and why haven’t you done her yet?
I don’t do Gen Z stuff, really, because I feel too close to it. I’m a cusper millennial so between gen z and millennial, (from the midlands, bisexual, destined to always be between things…) some people do that current satire really well, like Leo Reich, but I tend to play my generation as a child or teen and then look at our state that way. But I’d like to one day do something really current.