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We’re super happy to have opened to Five Star Reviews at Vault Festival this week, Live theatre next week is Sold Out.

Broadway World Review -

Bruce is an everyday run of the mill Geordie lad who desires more for his life. Living with his Nan he is unemployed and moping over a childhood sweetheart that has upped sticks and gone off to university. Unsure of his life’s direction, he discovers Silk Road; a backdoor to the dark web where all sorts of dangerous dealings go on undetected.

What are some of the dangerous dealings? Well, as the subtitle suggests it’s: ‘how to buy drugs online.’ How is this possible? Postman Pat delivers them straight to your door standard class, and his black and white cat is none the wiser.

The story of this plays creation is exciting in itself. After a call out on the real Silk Road forums for contributions to funding, an anonymous donor donated two bitcoin. Since then, bitcoin value has plummeted and two bitcoin are currently worth just over £15,000. Playwright Alex Oates as funded the entire production with this crypto currency.

Oates has done a tremendous job, and alongside director Dominic Shaw they have both created a production that is a rollercoaster of emotion from start to finish. The writing is electric, bouncy and with a vibrancy that constantly keeps you on your toes.

Josh Barrow brings the piece to life with his hour-long epic monologue, in which he plays a total of five different characters. Never once dipping in energy, his physicality and voice drastically change with each new person portrayed, and this allows him to demonstrate a lot of emotional depth and comic timing. It’s a fantastic performance from a promising young actor.

Throughout you’re really taken on a great story that ends up being rounded of incredibly well. Oates writes with a slickness and brutality that Shaw exploits brilliantly in his staging. The end result is a production that is of the finest quality, and it’ll probably end up being one of the highlights of this year’s festival

We have had some amazing publicity, check out our feature in one of the countries biggest papers!

 

So we are almost half way through our Edinburgh experience and some reviews have started coming in! Check them out!

***** - Quotidian Times

“A veritable tour de force, Baxter gives what must surely be a major contender for best performance of the Fringe 2014. … I would recommend this show to anyone and in a year when I have yet to see a disappointing piece of drama and the standards are high ‘Silk Road’ and Baxter are the best yet by quite some way.”

***** - The Public Reviews

“Baxter relates his story to the audience like they are his best friend and they are, because he enthrals, entertains and holds them. This is new writing at its best, well-staged and brilliantly acted, if only more festival shows were like this.”

**** - Broadway Baby

“James Baxter gives several nuanced performances under Dominic Shaw’s direction, bringing alive the wide-eyed Bruce and his shuffling, lisping Nan alongside a group of fleshed-out and hilarious minor characters.”

Rehearsals are going swimmingly for Silk Road, today we were fortunate enough to have movement director Gareth Taylor in the room.

Gareth is an associate artist of the Fringe First award winning  ‘ Curious Directive’ theatre company and has worked wonders on the physical score for Silk Road with actor James Baxter.

There’s a lovely article about us on The Daily Dot about us, for those too lazy to click here, here it is…

By Tom Harrington on July 21, 2014

The seedy world of the Deep Web is bleeding into the realm of art.

U.K.-based playwright Alex Oates is staging a one-man show based on the story of Silk Road, the online black market for drugs and other contraband that was shut down last year by the FBI.

Just the thought of a dramatic recreation of an Internet community might bring an unwelcome shudder as memories of Hackers and The Net come rushing back—memories where “hacking” took the form of some sort of 3D Tron-esque computer game and the limits of the ‘Net’s future utility is the buying of pizza.

So there’s good reason to be skeptical of Oates’s Silk Road, right? Maybe not.

“It’s something that’s difficult to blag,” Oates tells the Daily Dot. “Those awful, cringe-inducing hacker tropes were prevalent because they were just tasking middle-aged screenwriters to try and do something ‘current’ without really getting to grips with the technology or interacting with the communities.”

Oates says that he, along with other young artists, actually understand how to translate the drama of the Internet world for the stage. For example, Oates mentions Enda Walsh’s Chatroom as the play “that made me realise it is possible to do tech on stage without having a bunch of people wiggling their fingers air-typing on imaginary keyboards.”

Oates’s Silk Road is inspired by interviews and interactions with anonymous users and vendors on Silk Road’s forums. It follows Bruce Blakemore, “a struggling young tech-head” from Newcastle in the United Kingdom, who, along with his grandmother, are drawn into an “Underworld Wide Web of new-age pirates and local gangsters.”

As a plot, it is not as far-fetched as it may sound. “These aren’t simply jejune junkies who just happen to know their way around a computer. Debate about international and national drug policy is in depth and well informed,” says Oates. “There are also a lot of discussions surrounding libertarian ideals and global economic and socio-political systems.

“The revolution may not be televised, but I’m wondering if it might be streamed.”

Oates is not the first to see the dramatic possibilities in the Silk Road takedown. Last October, 20th Century Fox licensed the rights to a Wired article by journalist Joshua Davis, which told the story of the site’s seizure by the FBI and the arrest of alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross William Ulbricht.

In Oates’s version, Silk Road is portrayed in a positive light in his play, he says, both as a technological acheivement and as a refutation of the worldwide War on Drugs.

“We explain the site and how it works in a down-to-earth and passionate fashion because, frankly, it is a pretty exciting development in technology,” he says. “People clinging to the concept of the War on Drugs may find it difficult that the play upholds it as a potentially safer and generally better alternative to street drug dealing.”

Not only is Silk Road one of the first theatrical productions to tackle the world of the Deep Web, it’s also one of the first—if not the first—to accept the Internet’s favorite form of payment: Bitcoin.

“I created a new account on Silk Road 2.0 forums telling them all about the play. One of the most well-established vendors sent me a private message saying that once they could ascertain that the play was for real they’d donate to our cause,” says Oates. “I launched the appeal for bitcoins on our website and immediately we received the donation.”

While Oates is accepting Bitcoin donations through the Silk Road website, the two bitcoins he received after chatting with a Silk Road vendor didn’t actually go toward the production itself.

“Because taking a play to Edinburgh is so expensive, and because so much of that cost has to be shouldered by the team and paid upfront, we sold them straight away to pay for the deposit on our flat for the month.

“We sold them for £600, they would currently get us about £740 and are predicted to be worth £2000 by the end of the year. So I’m a bit gutted.”

Silk Road premieres in August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, after a preview in London on July 27.

Photo via Antti T. Nissinen/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed

We hit our Kickstarter campaign target! Thanks so much to everyone who donated and helped us make sure that this play can happen. Nobody likes asking for money and we all felt a bit awkward about it so we are eternally grateful that friends, family, dominatrix’s and total strangers rallied around us to help out!

It will all be worth it in August!

Thanks again!

Alex