This high-octane new comedy from the multi-award-winning physical theatre company Voloz Collective is a irreverent, revisionist approach to one of America’s most mythologised conspiracies . Set in Roswell, New Mexico – long associated with UFO folklore – the show blends virtuoso physical theatre, acrobatics and live music in a world where nothing is quite what it seems. This is a story about how we manipulate the truth yet still hope it might offer meaning in a world that often refuses to make sense. We hold this dialogue with Olivia Zerphy.
What drew you to Roswell and UFO folklore as a lens for exploring truth, myth, and modern conspiracy culture?
Roswell in the 1970s is a great playground for this piece because it sits at this cultural moment where we’re really seeing institutional trust begin to crumble. It’s post-Vietnam War, on the brink of the Watergate scandal.
What’s useful about UFOs – and Roswell specifically is that belief in aliens is, on the surface, relatively innocuous. It lets us examine conspiracy, myth-making, and the human need to believe in something in a slightly purer, less loaded form.
Also, it’s very fun! The setting is inherently playful and ripe for comedy. The show starts with aliens, but it’s not actually about aliens/UFO’s at all. It’s about belief, storytelling, and the immense challenge of even beginning to make sense of this insane world we’ve found ourselves in.
How do you balance the heightened physicality and cinematic style with the complexity of a layered, “cover-up” narrative?
One of the challenges with a story called Redacted: The Cover-Up of a Cover-Up of the Cover-Up is making sure the audience doesn’t need their own evidence board to follow everything.
We created these two cops who are investigating the case alongside Marnie. They’re perpetually a few steps behind, pretty incompetent, and often drawing the wrong conclusions. However, in trying to piece everything together, they become accidental narrators for the audience. In their staff meetings, they stop and sum up what we’ve seen, and what they think they know. They’re often hilariously off-base, but they help us translate some of the more visual or wordless sequences, providing a grounding force inside the spiralling story.
In what ways does Marnie Makowski’s journey reflect our current relationship with misinformation and competing versions of truth?
Marnie is doing what I think most of us are doing every day now- which is trying to wade through competing realities to construct some kind of coherent truth.
For her, that means navigating 1970s Roswell, where everyone knows part of something, nobody’s really telling the full story, many versions of events contradict each other, and everyone is convinced that their version is the truth. Today, we experience that through algorithms, news cycles, and digital echo chambers. The setting is different, but the emotional experience of wading through all that is similar.
What makes Marnie’s journey particularly urgent is that it’s not just intellectual for her. She’s dealing with her own emotional baggage from the past, and she’s in literal danger because she’s being framed for a crime she didn’t commit. Her search for truth isn’t just this abstract thing, it’s deeply personal and has immediate consequences for her life.
I think that urgency, and that sense of personal implication, is something audiences will recognise.
How did you approach structuring a story where each character offers only fragments of an “impossible” reality?
With many sticky notes, many arrows, and very full whiteboards.
We use history as a jumping-off point, but very quickly the show departs from anything resembling historical accuracy and disappears down its own rabbit hole.
A lot of the devising process involved mapping out layers of perception: this character saw X, interpreted it as Y, which then became the story of Z.
Once we finally discovered the ending, it forced us to go back through the earlier parts of the show again and again, making sure we were planting the right information at the right moments. The show really takes audiences (and took us during the devising process) on a wild journey, but we were determined that underneath the chaos there would still be a genuine internal logic.
What does the show suggest about why audiences are so drawn to conspiracy narratives, even when they defy logic?
One thing we were really conscious of was approaching conspiracy thinking with compassion and not with condescension.
Believing in conspiracy theories is not a naïve or stupid thing to do, and it’s not indicative of some moral or intellectual flaw in the believer. Those beliefs are often born out of fear, grief, shame, disenchantment, or a feeling that the systems around you have stopped making sense and/or stopped working for you.
At the core of it, this search for meaning is of course, incredibly human. We all do it. When something happens in our personal lives, or globally, that feels too big and painful and chaotic to understand, stories help us impose order. That sense of order can feel like an absolute necessity just to keep going.
Right now we’re living in something of a belief vacuum. Traditional institutions carry less authority than they once did, fewer people place their faith in religion or political systems, and at the same time our digital ecosystems and the algorithms shaping them have an extraordinary (and terrifying) influence over what we believe to be true.
So the question isn’t really “Why do people believe strange things?” It’s “How could we not?”
How does your blend of humour, acrobatics, and live music shape the way audiences engage with uncertainty and ambiguity?
Our theatrical language is already highly heightened. We’re not a company that’s particularly interested in slice-of-life realism or reproducing everyday behaviour onstage.
Because of our acrobatic and music style that is so different from everyday life, there’s already an unspoken agreement with the audience: we are constructing something for you.
That creates an interesting meta tension between the story we’re feeding them and the act of storytelling itself. Theatre is, ultimately, also just a story – or a constructed version of events. One could even say theatre itself is a conspiracy. So in that way, the form that we use to tell stories feels very relevant to the content of this show that is already about truth, myth, and manipulation.
Comedy is also really critical in this story because humour lets audiences lower their guard and lean into ideas that might otherwise feel heavy or unsettling.
Most importantly – the music, humor, and physical theatre make it all more fun! We want audiences to lose themselves in the story, in the rhythm, in the language, and in the joy we take in creating worlds using just our bodies, our voices, and physical theatre.
We hope our style will mean audiences are not sitting there intellectualising while they watch. We want them caught up in the ride, and then to leave the theatre asking questions, thinking back over things, and maybe questioning some of their own beliefs.
Pleasance Dome (King Dome) from Wednesday 5th – Sunday 30th August (not 12th, 19th, 24th) at 13:55.
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/redacted-the-cover-up-of-a-cover-up-of-a-cover-up