Following a successful run in 2024, Deluge by Gabi Flares returns to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, inviting audiences back into its surreal, tender and darkly humorous exploration of grief. We sat down with Gabi to hear more about her critically acclaimed work, and how it has evolved since its debut.
Deluge will be performed 15:30 at Underbelly’s Big Belly, Underbelly Cowgate, Thursday 05 – Sunday 30 August (no show 18 Aug).
After its 2024 run, what feels newly discovered or reshaped in Deluge as it returns to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?
A lot has changed, actually. The comedy has grown, the structure has been reworked. It’s the version of a show that emerges after you have lived with it for a while.
The show blends clowning, movement and text — how do you balance humour and grief without undercutting either?
Grief is a contradiction we carry. One moment you are laughing, the next you are on the floor, the next you’re laughing at yourself for being on the floor. So I feel the show isn’t really mixing two opposite things, but rather following that logic.
I think comedy is generous. It drops people’s guard, brings them close, and then something else can get in… Maybe something they weren’t necessarily ready for?
I think of it like a tennis match. A rhythm, a back and forth, until something cuts: maybe it’s a joke, maybe it’s something quieter, more poetic. I love living in that in-between. That suspension before you know where it is going to land. Sometimes you don’t even know what landed until you are already past it. Maybe you laugh and then catch yourself: could I laugh at this?
Yes. Why not? Not taking yourself too seriously is part of letting things go. Releasing rather than holding on. Which might be the ultimate stage of grief.
Deluge draws on over 40 real stories — how did those voices shape the emotional core of the piece?
I became absorbed in a question: what are people actually grieving for? Not the obvious losses, but the quieter ones. Projects that never happened, friendships that slowly disappeared, versions of yourself you never became. And also things without clear endings.
So I put out a callout and asked strangers to share their stories. Over 40 people responded. These stories became the heart of it, and the fiction grew around them.
This is the second show I have made this way. I keep coming back to interviewing people. I suspect my mum being a psychoanalyst has something to do with it.
And there is something that feels important about it too: the reminder that you are not alone in the things you think are most private. That recognition is what those voices brought to the show.
The imagery of leaks and rising water is striking — what does that metaphor unlock for you on stage?
It came from something I said to a friend after a break-up: “if I could count all my thoughts in litres and add everything I’ve cried, I could flood a house.” I said it and immediately thought: Ah, that’s my next show!
I was trying to explain what I was feeling, trying to give it a shape. And that’s the main metaphor of the show: a woman in a house that is about to flood. It is a magical realist piece. And that’s what magical realism does: it takes what is felt but unseen and makes it physical, present, impossible to ignore. It doesn’t abandon reality, it stretches it. One foot in the real, one foot in the surreal. And that push and pull is what makes it relatable, it creates a world that feels close but somehow far, absurd but almost believable. This is my second show in that world and my next will be too. I keep coming back because it does something other genres don’t.
Grief is largely invisible. But what if you could see it? What if it filled a room, spilled over, took the shape of water, jam, ladders, a Komodo dragon?
As a solo performer, how do you sustain both the physical and emotional intensity across the hour?
Philippe Gaulier used to repeat it constantly: the pleasure is what guides you. Pleasure keeps you present. Finding pleasure in the drama, in dying, in crying, in dancing, anything you do on stage. What actually costs me energy is when I get ahead of the moment.
The pleasure of playing and being with the audience. As simple and as slippery as that! And of course rehearsal, repetition… the show is technical and choreographed, which means my body just knows it. I follow the body memory, stay with the audience, and something new always opens up. Every night is slightly different.
Oh and training, meditation, and a lot of sauna. That helps a lot. Honestly: go to the sauna.
Your work often explores the body as storyteller — what can movement express about grief that words can’t?
Grief doesn’t make sense. And I think that’s why words struggle with it, maybe words are always trying to? Maybe that’s what we ask of words: to make sense of things.
The body leaks the truth whether you want it to or not. You’re laughing but your whole body is tense. All fingers still gripping while you are saying you are having the best day of your life…
Grief is so full of contradictions that words kind of fail it. You love someone and yet you are letting them go. The body holds all of it at the same time.
With movement you can suspend logic, suspend meaning. Movement is an image, a presence, a process of making sense without ever needing to land on a final answer. It extends images, opens them up, invites the audience to find their own way in.
And then there is what movement can do with beauty: it can take something that feels stuck and unbearable and make it somehow… visible. Not resolved. Just seen.