Interview: exit strategy on How to Win a Gameshow (Edinburgh Fringe)
- Immersive Rumours
- 14 hours ago
- 5 min read
Photo: exit strategy
exit strategy's How to Win a Gameshow, which comes to Edinburgh Fringe this August, is a participatory show that follows Graham, who has spent an indeterminate amount of time trapped as a contestant inside a bizarre game show. The show explores our own capacities for complicity under observation, our impulses as a group and as individuals, and our presumed anonymity in theatrical, social, and technological spaces.
Blending the entertainment inherent in game shows with improvisation and audience interaction, the show turns spectators into active participants as it explores surveillance, conformity, complicity, and challenges the expectation that audience members can ever be passive observers in theatrical space.
Ahead of its Edinburgh Fringe run, we caught up with one of exit strategy's founding members, MaryKate Glenn, to talk about the creation of How To Win A Gameshow, the relationship between audiences and live performance, and the strong reactions the show has generated during previews in New York City.
Immersive Rumours: Hi MaryKate! Thanks for speaking with us today. To kick things off, do you mind telling us a bit about exit strategy and your approach to making theatre?
MaryKate Glenn: exit strategy is a multi-disciplinary, New York City-based performance collective investigating the role of the audience in live performance. We were founded by me, Rupert Krüger, and Jane Skapek, and we draw on the founding members’ respective backgrounds in dance, martial arts, and visual composition.
As a collective, we ground our research interests in themes of surveillance, the absurd, conformity, violence, humor, cruelty, and our ability to hold all of these realities simultaneously as one. exit strategy is a company made up largely of physical performers - though so far our work has skewed much more image-based than physical choreography.
The concepts for Gameshow specifically grew almost completely out of these images. For example, a giant red timer, a bowl full of Jolly Ranchers, a handheld microphone, a man alone writing postcards at a desk, a bejeweled cowboy hat... these images all fed the initial inspiration for Gameshow, and using tools many of our company members learned from physical devising companies such as The Useless Room or Frantic Assembly, we began to piece together these image montages into a structure that was built to affect, involve, and implicate the audience in a specific way.
Our collaboration in the room is wholly non-hierarchical. We argue a lot, write a lot on giant pieces of paper, throw out absurd ideas, and more often than not decide to incorporate them, and generally operate by a ‘best idea wins’ or ‘let's just try it and see’ approach.
Photo: exit strategy
Immersive Rumours: Your show, How To Win A Gameshow, is heading to Edinburgh Fringe this August. In a few words, can you tell us about the role the audience plays within it?
MaryKate Glenn: The audience is THE central component of the show and the reason it happens at all! You'll have to come to understand why…
Immersive Rumours: Amongst other themes, the show asks whether audiences can be passive observers within theatre. What first drew you to that idea, and how is it explored in the show?
MaryKate Glenn: We were very inspired by the work of American performance artist Ann-Liv Young - an incredible boundary-pushing artist whose work wholly upends the relationship between audience and performer. It was after seeing her piece ‘Marie Antoinette’ that we, as makers, really began to rethink the justification for LIVE theatre. How can we earn an audience's attention and presence in a world of screens and constant media onslaught? What can truly differentiate live theater from a movie or streaming series?
The answer, of course, is that all of our bodies are together in space, so how can we center that, honor that, and capitalize on that to create a potent emotional and intellectual experience for performers and audience alike? Gone, for the most part, are the days when a standard kitchen sink drama is drama or the proscenium structure is enough to hold an audience's presence.
I even think about going to see Shakespeare in the Park, here in NYC or at the Globe in London. I had a distinct experience of a woman at Shakespeare in the Park (a free, outdoor, prestigious summer theatrical event in NYC) shushing me and my friend when we reacted too vocally to a production of Richard III a few years ago.
Why do we feel like we have to do this? Why can't we all confront together that we’re live humans having emotional responses in real time to the other live humans in front of us? What a unique thing - let's lean into it.
Immersive Rumours: How did How To Win A Gameshow first come to be, and how has it evolved since it was first conceived?
MaryKate Glenn: Our initial residency was with Triplets Amsterdam at the Broedplaats Bouw Arts Center, and we toured Gameshow’s first draft to 4bid Gallery at 0t301 and Dijke Theater in the Netherlands.
Thematically, it was still in its infancy, but we explored themes of absurdity and the ‘quotidian uncanny’ - simple gestures and behaviors that make the audience feel something is not quite right. Tonally, the piece is inspired by work like Twin Peaks and Severance - art that asks the viewer to consider what might be absurd and horrifying about the everyday.
This quickly expanded into questions and explorations of auto-surveillance: how do we comply in advance with everyday forms of surveillance, and how do people behave differently under perceived (and real) observation?
Photo: exit strategy
Immersive Rumours: What has the audience reaction to the show been like so far?
MaryKate Glenn: It's been vast and varied. When we performed an earlier iteration in Europe last year, it was largely to movement and dance spaces that I think didn't quite know what to do with it. They were locked in for sure - we had people come multiple times to different venues - but I think it was very different from other work they were used to seeing.
Some of our methods are perhaps slightly more familiar to New York audiences, but our initial approach of image-based associative storytelling, as opposed to traditional narrative building, seemed to really hook people in an interesting way.
Some feedback we've gotten that we're proud of from the version a year ago and our New York preview this past weekend described it as ‘wonderfully unnerving', ‘so stressful I wanted to leave’, and someone said that they felt like at any point they would be taken out back and shot. Of course, no one is getting shot - we're not that American, don't worry!
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?
MaryKate Glenn: We are so tired already but so excited and grateful for the chance to workshop this piece sixteen times. As you'll see, it's nearly impossible to rehearse the show without an audience. Even during our preview weekend here in New York, we'd changed the ending by the final show. So we are excited to test out and experiment with different ways to create this experience…
exit strategy's How to Win a Gameshow runs at Lower Theatre at theSpace @ Niddry St (Venue 9) between 7th and 15th August, and Venue 45 at theSpace @ Venue 45 between 17th and 22nd August 2026. For more information and to book tickets, visit edfringe.com
Immersive Rumours will be at the Edinburgh Fringe this August. See our pre-festival coverage here.
