Get silly with clown Alistair Aitcheson as he expands what’s possible in audience-centric theater. Dig into why clowns can feel both joyful and unsettling, and how curiosity, audience trust, and failure turn a show into a shared act of play. In this episode, Alistair shares how clown training reshaped his interactive work with a focus on his show My Date with Piers Brosnan, fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival The conversation also explores how clowning overlaps with drag, how audience participation becomes safer when the performer takes the risk, and why “every bug is a feature” might be the best clowning principle of all.
Summary
- Why clown makeup can be uncanny, especially when it exaggerates the mouth and breaks normal facial expectations
- Alistair traces his path from making video games as a teenager to building interactive theatre experiences
- How clown training helped solve a design problem by teaching him how to connect directly with audiences and remove the “fourth wall”
- Why the clown should be the most outrageous person in the room so that the audience feels safe to take risks
- Compare clowning and drag as related forms that share curiosity, theatrical exaggeration, and a challenge to social norms
- How the clown sees the world as a blank slate, asking what objects are for and how they might be played with instead of assumed
- Clowning and software bugs are connected because failure creates surprises, and surprises are where the real magic happens
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