Meet Black Bright
Horror theatre is still a rare and bold art form - as are the companies brave enough to pursue it. Black Bright is one of those companies, and they are pushing the boundaries of what horror theatre can be in all the right ways.
Based in Sheffield, Black Bright is an original, dark, female-led theatre company making work that draws on folk horror, post-apocalypticism, psychological horror and the female experience, with a distinctly naturalistic grit.
This year they're taking their new show, The Hunger, to the Edinburgh Fringe, and we were lucky enough to sit down with co-founders Madeleine Farnhill and Helen Denning to find out more.
Tell us more about Black Bright?
“We founded Black Bright in 2021 out of a shared desire for new writing that centres nuanced female characters. Madeleine took on the role of Artistic Director and writer, and Helen as Producer and Company Manager. We’d met a few years before this though at University, then Madeleine auditioned for a play that Helen was producing at the student theatre company. The Hunger was actually our first collaboration, and solidified our strong working relationship and mutual interests in female-led stories, horror and classic stagecraft. Since then we have brought another new play ‘Birdwatching’ to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which then transferred to China and embarked on a regional tour back home. The show is a folk horror about the female experience that doesn’t look away. It aims to provoke conversations around street harassment, LGBTQIA+ issues, neurodiversity and the cultural voyeurism of female identifying/presenting people.
We are proud to say that in our first 5 years as a company, we have established ourselves as unapologetically dark, regional and female, with audiences and critics alike. In that time we’ve also worked with and supported organisations that share our values. Horror is an exceptional vessel for story telling, and we intend to keep creating original stories for many years to come.”
What inspired you to create The Hunger, and what is the show about?
Madeleine: “I had a very clear visual concept for The Hunger: a mother and daughter, a kitchen table, a dangerous outside world and lots of blood and sick.
I adore genre and wanted to consume as much post-apocalypticism as possible, particularly stories that centered on intimate, human stories in the middle of sweeping bleakness. But there was one question that bothered me about many of them: where were all the women? Commonly I found that they were either alluded to being dead or enslaved by men - and I thought there’s got to be another angle to this!
Yorkshire’s landscape beautifully lends itself to the genre, and I thought these characters must live there - in fact, their resilience is an extension of their Northernness, and their womanhood.”
“Deborah is based on a butcher from outside York called Annette - instantly likeable but evidently tough, always a flank of leg on the counter behind her as she was selling you jars of homemade jam. 15 year old Megan on the other hand is a coiled spring, a trapped hare in their barricaded home. The play begins about a year into the apocalypse, whereupon they are surviving off their own pig farm. Deborah’s rule is that all trespassers must be shot dead - absolutely no one is to be trusted. But when a young, starving boy appears outside their kitchen window, Megan’s desire for connection and Deborah’s brutality clash. The show ultimately hinges on the question: how far would you go for the ones you love?”
The Hunger is at The Space @ Niddry Street UPPER 7th - 15th August at 9:50am, before moving to The Space @ Niddry Street LOWER 17th - 22nd August at 10:10pm. It’s the ideal way to bookend a trip to the Fringe for lovers of horror theatre.
To help the company cover the costs of their accommodation in Edinburgh, they have a crowdfunder open with an aim of reaching £3700. If you’d like to support them, you can make donations here.
They’re also hoping to tour the show after the Fringe. For updates and to find out more here:
www.blackbrighttheatre.co.uk
and follow them on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.