Interview: Alistair Aitcheson on My Date with Pierce Brosnan (Edinburgh Fringe)
- Immersive Rumours
- Jul 13
- 8 min read
Photo: Jon Street
Alistair Aitcheson's My Date with Pierce Brosnan, which comes to the Edinburgh Fringe this August, is an interactive comedy that blends drag, clowning and video game technology. In the show, French maid Mademoiselle Cafetière comes face to face with the man of their dreams: Hollywood actor Pierce Brosnan. By scanning a QR code on their phones, audience members help build Cafetière's dating profile, place orders at her café, and give the lifeless dummy of Pierce Brosnan a personality through voice through a text-to-speech system.
Ahead of its Edinburgh Fringe run, we caught up with Alistair to talk about wild audience interactions, the joy of embracing unpredictability and their highlights from previous years at the festival.
Immersive Rumours: Hi Alistair. Thanks for speaking with us today! Your interactive show, My Date with Pierce Brosnan, is coming to the Edinburgh Fringe this August. For anyone unfamiliar with the show, what can audiences expect, and what role do they play within it?
Alistair Aitcheson: I play Mademoiselle Cafetière, the loneliest maid in Paris, and it so happens, also a clown. Through a series of events, she ends up on a date with a talking dummy of Pierce Brosnan, which is controlled by the audience. At the start of the show, everyone scans a QR code, which takes them to a website where they can type in what they want Pierce Brosnan to say. When their message is submitted, it plays out aloud over the speakers, and I, as Mademoiselle Cafetière, respond in real-time to my talking celebrity lover.
The whole show is about 50 minutes long, and in that time, you get to be part of the full story of Cafetière's lonely life in her cafe. You pretend to be the customers and order what you’d like brought to your seat. You write my dating profile. You write what Pierce Brosnan says and does on our date. Plus, there's also a big musical finale in which I improvise a song about our romantic honeymoon to destinations of your invention.
Immersive Rumours: How did My Date with Pierce Brosnan first come about? Was there a particular idea or theme that you wanted to explore with the piece?
Alistair Aitcheson: It all began with a livestream. I used to do these art-making livestreams where I’d get viewers to direct me to make paintings and dance routines, and I wanted to bring my love of clowning into that space. I turned my flat into a cafe, and the character of Cafetière emerged during the stream. Soon I was sending her on dates with imaginary suitors on the other side of the camera, collectively voiced by the viewers.
I loved doing the streams and thought that I could turn it into a 10-minute act that I could take to a drag night. The dummy of Pierce Brosnan came in to act as an audience surrogate now that the camera wasn’t there.
People loved that act and very quickly found ways to push the limits of what was possible with it and what they could provoke me into doing on stage. I found it all very exciting. Love and heartbreak are juicy high-stakes themes for me as a clown! I loved the big, dramatic situations Cafetière would end up in, and I wanted to know what sides of her we’d discover if I let the audience spend a bit longer with her.
Photo: Filiz Moore
Immersive Rumours: What do you enjoy most about the unpredictability of the show, and how do you handle it when the audience takes things in a completely unexpected direction?
Alistair Aitcheson: The audience will always type things that surprise me. Pierce Brosnan will say things I can’t see coming, and the audience gets to see my genuine surprise as I'm wrong-footed by it and then see how I interpret it. Sometimes I’ll be really quick and respond with something clever that gets a big laugh. Sometimes I might struggle to respond, and I might really be floored by what you get him to say. That's also a funny moment because you get to feel the pride of being the one person in this room who managed to upstage the clown!
I've done this show many, many times now, and Pierce Brosnan still asks to do things he's never asked to before. I think that's why I love doing the show so much. It really is a different show every night, even for me, and I have a lot of fun discovering where the audience is going to take us.
Immersive Rumours: Alongside the unpredictable moments where the audience drives what’s happening, the show is structured to have four distinct acts. How do you balance those two elements?
Alistair Aitcheson: You’re right in that the main story beats of the show are baked in. The show has a voiceover of Cafetière’s fairy godmother. She’s the one who adds Cafetière to the dating app. She’s the one who brings the dummy of Pierce Brosnan to life. She’s the one who pronounces them married and sends them away on honeymoon. In a way, the show has licence to go off in some weird, unpredictable direction precisely because the pre-baked story beats can try to bring it back somewhere rational. But if the audience is collectively fighting to reject the pre-baked story beats, it all gets beautifully rebellious!
Let’s say Pierce Brosnan and Cafetière hate each other during the date. Well, the fairy godmother will send the two on a honeymoon anyway, and now the show takes a darker turn, and I can really play up the melodrama. One time, he died during dinner, and the show ended with Cafetière taking this lifeless dummy away on honeymoon and singing about what might have been.
Photo: Filiz Moore
Immersive Rumours: Have there been any particularly memorable shows or audience interactions that took the show in directions you never anticipated?
Alistair Aitcheson: In one show, I had multiple audience members let me put my hand in their mouth and feel around their teeth for bits of food.
Immersive Rumours: I was not expecting that to be the answer…
Alistair Aitcheson: Yeah. I wasn't expecting that either. It came up as an order in the cafe, to be sent to these two people in the front row. I don’t think they’d typed it in, and I was fully expecting them to say no. So I asked, 'May I put my hand in your mouth?’ and they said yes and opened their mouths wide expectantly. So in pops my hand, and I ask, 'Can I pick out the bits of food?’ They laughed and nodded - turns out they were really up for it!
The funny thing was, there was an audience member who’d said on the way in that he was afraid of clowns, and I told him, ‘That’s okay; don’t worry. I won’t pick on you.' But in this moment, I was filled with curiosity, and I wanted to see what would happen. So I turned to him and said, ‘You want in on this action?'. He opened his mouth wide and nodded his head like, ‘Come on in!'
Immersive Rumours: Are there still elements of the show that you’re still tweaking and changing with each new performance?
Alistair Aitcheson: Something that I’ve found has worked very well recently is having Cafetière be very gentle - at least at the start of the show. In earlier performances, I really enjoyed letting her be a bit more stroppy and grumpy with the audience. Those moments got good, big laughs, but for the beginning of the show, people need to feel welcome and comfortable in the space. Even if you’re not afraid of clowns, the idea of being sat in a tiny room with this very strange figure and asked to bear witness to her celebrity dream date… well, that can be quite intimidating. The audience isn’t keen to explore when they feel intimidated.
So before the show starts, I’m now out in the bar mingling with people in character so they can get used to the idea that Mademoiselle Cafetière is approachable and kind, and she’ll go along with anything out of sheer curiosity. In that safe space before the show starts, they’re getting a pocket-sized version of how to interact with the show.
If, as the show goes on, she becomes a little combative with the audience, the audience is on board with it because they know that she’s fun and sweet and on their side. Deep down, they’ve built some kind of connection, so they trust that this combativeness is a safe form of play – a provocation to take a few more risks.
Photo: John Kolikis
Immersive Rumours: You’ve previously attended the Edinburgh Fringe. What have been some of the highlights from when you’ve attended before?
Alistair Aitcheson: I’ve got two shows that jump out at me. One of them was called The Ceremony, and it was by Australian comedian Ben Volchok. During the show, Ben never says a thing, but it was a show full of dialogue. Somehow, just through wordless interactions with the audience, he became able to conduct us to say aloud all the dialogue of the show, and we ended up creating a PowerPoint presentation with him, on his computer, about what The Ceremony is. It was so imaginative. As a performer, his ability to make that connection with the audience, to get to the point where the entire room is playing this game with him, where they’re constructing the show with him, was magical.
Another show which I absolutely loved was called Spuds, and it was two guys dressed in potato costumes. They’re performing at the same time as me at the Free Fringe, so from a strategic perspective, I shouldn’t be shouting them out, but they are so bloody good. You have to go and see Spuds!
When I saw them, they were performing in this tiny little venue with about 30 seats. The premise was that these potatoes were supposed to be running a TV shopping channel, but because of how big their costumes were and how many props they had on stage, they were constantly tripping over stuff and bumping into stuff, and it was flying everywhere. They’re trying to keep the show together despite having set up a situation where they are genuinely going to keep breaking the stage apart, and it was beautiful. This is exactly the kind of clowning I love!
I feel like there’s a tendency in some acts to go onto a stage and want everything to be perfect, everything to be controlled, and to be able to guarantee that it'll be the same every night. Yet Spuds were so happy to set up a situation where things would go wrong in ways they couldn't see coming, and they would respond to that in the moment. You can see in their eyes that they’re genuinely surprised that their scene partner has tripped over the tripod and gone sailing into the wall. They were absolutely brilliant, and it was just this wonderfully playful and totally chaotic thing.
Immersive Rumours: Finally, how are you feeling ahead of taking the show to Edinburgh, and what are you most looking forward to during this year's festival?
Alistair Aitcheson: I’m nervous and scared, but in a good way. I think you have to be a little nervous, and if it’s not scary, it’s not worth doing. There are going to be difficulties and challenges that I could not have anticipated, but everything that I've learnt as a clown is true for real life as well. In the moments where you can't see what's coming, you have to adapt and learn on the fly. That’s where you find magic.
Finding something scary and doing it anyway is what’s led to a lot of the work that I'm proudest of. Of all the games I’ve made and shows I’ve put on, my favourites all emerged because I took a risk. Let’s find out what wrongfoots me, and let’s find out what beautiful solution emerges that turns it into an even better show.
My Date with Pierce Brosnan runs from 16th to 30th August at Front Room at Nineties at Laughing Horse @ City Cafe (Venue 85) as part of the Edinburgh Fringe. For more information, visit edfringe.com
Immersive Rumours will be at the Edinburgh Fringe this August. See our pre-festival coverage here.
