We've written in previous blogposts about how Planter's was written, and about how Fragen ideas emerged during that process. In this third and final blog reflecting on Planter’s Island, we remember behind-the-scenes moments during our rehearsal process, the performance itself, and the weird and wonderful audience reactions that opened our minds to the possibilities behind this way of working.

“RELAX,” Roland was shouting at the top of his lungs over the screaming drone of post-apocalyptic ambient rock as teachers filed in to witness a sneak preview of Planter’s Island rehearsals before its first performance. “RELAX. Flow. Go with it. Don’t pre-empt, don’t anticipate.”
Ben was shrieking like a wolf, shakily balanced in a handstand against the wall, transforming into a man-spider. Jamie was in meltdown, shivering in a bathtub, wrapped in a curtain he’d ripped from the rehearsal studio ceiling. Eleanor lashed at them both with a leather whip she’d picked up from God knows where. Just another average day putting on a small play at Drama Centre.
In the Studio
Rehearsals for Planter’s Island were as unpredictable as the play itself. We weren’t focused only on staging the script, bizarre enough in itself. Further than that, we were trying to hit an energy, a point of exhaustion which wasn’t the destination of the piece but the point of departure. “BREATHLESS.” It’s written in the play time after time, and in many Fragen pieces since, and it’s not quite obvious to us what it means. Our instinct tells us, though, that this point of exhaustion is something to follow. We never wanted to put work onto the stage which was cool, controlled, superior, knowing. We wanted to expose our frailty, our vulnerability through action. To take risks. To embarrass ourselves, make fools of ourselves. There was something theatrical in this place of exhaustion. We wanted to make the audience feel as though they were watching a sporting event and not a prewritten story. Anything can happen when athletes and actors are working beyond their physical breaking point.
The purpose in rehearsal was to construct an experience that mirrored the surreal, fragmented way we remember and process the world, whether in dreams, hallucinations or memories. We spent hours experimenting with transitions between memory and fantasy, pushing the actors to embrace fluidity rather than delineation. Breakthroughs came in the most unexpected moments when frenzied action died down into broken intimacy, like when Jamie and Eleanor worked on a scene where Plotter confronts his mercurial, transforming ex-wife. Instead of marking each shift between past and present, they allowed one moment to melt into the next. They nearly broke through their masks of play and deceit. They almost shared a truth together. Plotter almost figured out that his subconscious was playing tricks on him. And then, as quickly as it was broken, the illusion returned. That sensation of dream logic became a guiding principle for the entire production.
Our approach to rehearsals combined Meisner and Stanislavsky techniques with active listening, line repetitions and free improvisatory play accompanied by music, grounding the chaos in impulse and response. Structured play was our mantra setting a framework and then allowing raw instinct to dictate the moments. For the actors, it was about trusting each other, trusting the moment, even when the situation felt totally absurd. This balance of discipline and unpredictability designed for us a new way to work, which we have stuck with in all the years since.
Even in the rehearsal room, Vivian Lu’s set design was an unspoken collaborator, the silent protagonist. She gave the actors this tactile, gritty space to inhabit, full of colour and texture. It was a whole world that became a character in its own right. The walls felt grimy, the furniture seemed stolen, and nothing sat quite right, a physical embodiment of the play’s shifting reality. The actors had to respond to it, not just use it, and that changed everything.
Onstage
Of course, we also battled the inevitable setbacks of a drama school production: limited time, no resources, no space to rehearse in, scenes we adored getting cut because the run-time was so tight. We rehearsed in the shower room half the time because no studios were available to us. Roland was always losing his mind over the smallest thing, but the actors didn’t really care. They got the process on some deeper level. Surrendered to it. Trusted it, and trusted each other. It wasn’t serious. It became a big game in a tiny, ridiculous world. So silly. So much fun. The constraints forced us into innovation.
There was a moment in our tech rehearsal that Roland remembers with horror, and Ben can’t help remembering with a laugh, when our major piece of technical equipment, which cost half our budget, had to be cut at the last minute because it didn’t work. There was meant to be an autopsy table for this morgue scene. As it's written in the scene, the table rolls in by itself, flat, covered in a sheet. Then, slowly, a body rises up through the sheet, the coroner appears from underneath, takes off the sheet and there’s a body there. So simple. In theory.
It was rigged up so that Ben, playing the coroner, could fit underneath. Curled up on all fours, he had to push this heavy steel table our from backstage with Eleanor lying on a platform inside it. Then he had to hand crank her platform so that Eleanor’s form would rise up under the sheet and the effect would be revealed.
As it turned out, the thing was so heavy that Ben couldn’t even roll it over the electric cables on the edge of the stage. Once it was out there, the body cranking up was so agonisingly slow that Roland lost it halfway through. After a fierce debate, our minimal time for tech rehearsal running out, he made the call. The table was cut. Vivian was fuming. She’d worked on it forever. But that’s theatre. Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings.
In Performance
For all our experimentation, it wasn’t until we were under lights, in front of an audience, that we truly saw Planter’s Island for what it was. It was like staring at pieces of a puzzle for weeks and then suddenly stepping back and seeing the full picture. The momentum of the performances drew the actors through. They had nowhere to hide, onstage for the full duration, always active, always fully committed, creating a sense of exhilarating unpredictability. Each night was a new dream, slightly reassembled from the last.
Some audience members were enraptured, riding the surreal shifts in time and identity with total immersion. Others were baffled but intrigued, watching with the slightly stunned expression of someone trying to recall a forgotten memory. That was the key. Planter’s Island wasn’t telling a story in a traditional sense; it was triggering internal narratives in the audience, personal and unpredictable.
During rehearsal, we hadn’t considered audience reaction at all. Not that we weren’t focused on the quality. We worked our socks off to do the best, most entertaining job. But if they didn’t get it, if they didn’t enjoy it, if they booed and hissed or walked out, we wouldn’t have minded, because we knew we were offering something different. Something people might not expect.
As it turned out, word of mouth spread fast. We only had four performances. The first was about half full. By the second, we were turning people away. The Platform Theatre allowed us to add some chairs to the ends of rows, and some people were permitted to stand at the back. Everybody wanted to see the work of these three actors doing this seemingly impossible task. And people laughed. That was the weird thing. That was what we hadn’t expected. We laughed a lot during rehearsals but more because the whole thing was so ridiculous. We didn’t think it was actually funny. But there were so many surprising laughs in there, along with the horror and the weirdness.
It was hard to gauge the audience feedback because it wasn’t uniform. “How did you know the contents of my dreams?” someone asked Roland after they were leaving one performance. Another, a teacher, took him by the hand and just shook it for about two minutes straight, staring off into space, trying to figure out what to say. We weren’t looking for compliments, so this reaction thrilled us. We wanted people to leave with the feeling that they had really been somewhere. Seen something. Had an experience they could never have anywhere else.
The impact
Looking back, Planter’s Island wasn’t only a production for us. It was the beginning of an approach. It gave us permission to do more of the same in future. To approach audiences as our authentic selves and allow them to make up their own minds about what they'd seen without any recourse to manipulation or psychological trickery. To focus in on the experience behind our events and not worry so much. The experimental ethos that emerged from its chaos has shaped every project we’ve tackled since, from Blush of Dogs to Hell Yes, I’m Tough Enough. It taught us that theatre isn’t just about storytelling, but about questioning how stories are experienced. It pushed us toward a methodology that interrogates narrative norms, audience perception, and the boundary between structure and spontaneity.
At the time, we didn’t fully understand what we were doing. Now, more than a decade later, the ripples of Planter’s Island are still moving through our work. It was a shared dream, wild, raw, and utterly unpredictable. And that’s exactly why it mattered.
As we’re working now towards two shows for Edinburgh 2025, ‘Hunger’ and ‘Abhorrent Little Scrotum’, we’re enjoying looking back on our early work to check in with our roots, remind ourselves of what it was inspired us to do the work we’re doing now, and remind ourselves that, even if it’s weird and not everybody’s cup of tea, there is something about the Fragen experience which you cannot find anywhere else.
31.01.25
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