Having won a Binge Fringe Queer Performers Award and received a dozen four and five-star reviews, Goblin is a “seriously impressive” darkly comic solo performance about growing up, obsession and the transformative power of being seen. The show has been several years in development, taking in Camden People’s Theatre, Pleasance and Summerhall before arriving at Park Theatre this autumn.
- What drew you to set Eliot’s story in 2007, and what does that period allow you to explore?
I was Eliot’s age in 2007, if you can even believe that! A lot of people are shocked to find out I wasn’t born in the late two thousand tens. But it’s one of the most vivid periods in my memory as far as pop culture and general vibes go because I was at peak pubescence at the time, and I think the chemicals in your brain at that age condition you to absorb everything in the most excruciatingly vivid way. So revisiting it was both a deeply nostalgic experience and, in some ways, a profoundly cringe one.
- How did you balance the show’s humour and nostalgia with its darker themes?
Balancing humour and darkness was one of the key dramaturgical challenges of making this show. My director Ellie B.W. was instrumental in facilitating the process through which I wrote and developed the piece. It involved not just balancing comedy and thematic darkness, but more specifically determining what the comedy is doing in light of the darkness. What it’s saying and how the audience’s laughter is telling us something about what’s happening in the show, what they’re feeling, what we should be thinking or feeling about the character. That was a key consideration from the very beginning.
- What made you want to make the audience an active character in Eliot’s story?
In the beginning the audience wasn’t always a character in the show, which took a lot of different shapes and forms across years of development. In general, my performance style as a comedian often involves talking to the audience, so I definitely was addressing them from the earliest work-in-progress iterations of Goblin. At some point it just kind of made sense to have the audience play the character of ‘Goblin,’ this metaphysical entity that exists both within and outside the frame of the narrative. As soon as we tested that at a work-in-progress, probably in late 2023 or early 2024, we immediately knew it fit like a glove. Something had been cracked open in the storytelling that we hadn’t accessed before.
- What did you want to explore through Eliot’s relationship with the much older Max?
It’s a really complicated and painful relationship. I’ve had experience from a pretty young age of relationships and power dynamics with people much older than me, and while the specific beats of the story as they happen in Goblin are a fiction, there’s so much of my own life and experience in it. And I think a lot of people have experienced some version of a really fraught and imbalanced dynamic in a romantic relationship, possibly where there’s an age difference. What I wanted to explore was how that kind of dynamic sets the stage for a person to be changed in ways they don’t even realise while it’s happening. And then I’m interested in asking what one does with change that happened in a way that only partially felt like your choice. Whether it’s possible to own it, to reverse it. What the feelings are that come with that. They’re uncomfortable and dark questions, but I think they’re really important ones that we tend not to engage with precisely because they’re uncomfortable.
- How has Goblin evolved through its years of development and at times unusual performance spaces? Whats has this process been like?
The original idea was a show about a crazy evil gay spin instructor. I tried that in a series of work-in-progress performances in 2022 and they were not good. It wasn’t funny or fun for anybody involved. But I still felt like there was something there, some heart in it that meant something. And with time I realised the more interesting question was: okay, we have this difficult grown-up, but what made him that way? What if he actually started out as this sweet, loveable, naive kid? My own teenage nostalgia and some of my own life experiences came into the picture. I was thinking it would just be my comedy debut in Edinburgh, but that wasn’t right either as it’s very much a piece of theatre, too.
Because of that hybrid nature, and because of how festivals and programming work, it was really just up to me to keep this thing alive for so many years, because there are very few programmes or structures for developing work that lives between genre categories. So I self-produced its development financially, off the back of stand-up touring, together with a team of extraordinary people: Ellie B.W. from the very beginning, Han Sayles from the very beginning, then Hattie North, Sammy Glover, Hazel Lowe, a whole slew of wonderful collaborators. We performed in basements all over London, in gay bars. We were in a yurt the first time we did Edinburgh, but then the yurt collapsed. The Pleasance kindly let us have one of their spaces. The following year we were at Summerhall. We did a couple of shows at Soho Theatre. And now we’re at the Park for a proper theatrical run in London. This is the first time the show has the space to breathe and to find its audience.
- What do you hope audiences recognise in Eliot’s journey to finding himself again?
I hope people recognise the universal comedy and horror of growing up and realising you’ve changed in ways you didn’t notice while they were happening. And I think there’s something about not just individual ownership of yourself and your actions, but collective ownership of the hard things that happen in our midst. I’m really interested in having a room full of people think through the genuinely chewy, challenging things that come up in the show, because the nature of the dynamic between the audience as ‘Goblin’ and me as the protagonist means we’re in conversation with one another the whole time. I’m most interested in making things that don’t just end with catharsis and let people go on with their day. I want to make things that encourage people to keep engaging with difficult stuff. But hopefully in a way that also had them laughing.
Goblin runs at Park Theatre (Park90), London, from 17 November–5 December 2026. Tickets £15–£18, available at https://parktheatre.co.uk/events/goblin/