Noel Byrne is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Box Tale Soup and is currently a performer for the company.
Outside of this, he’s enjoyed an extremely varied professional career including everything from Shakespeare on stage to voice and motion capture for video games, as well as television work for the BBC’s Doctor Who, The One Show and Mission 2110. He is an award – winning street performer and is often creating and devising new work, including pieces for Manchester’s Contact Theatre and London’s Royal Court . Noel graduated with a BA (Hons) in Theatre Arts from Manchester ’s highly regarded Capitol Theatre School and later gained a PGCE from the University of Leeds.
Noel joins us on Close-Up Culture to talk about his work on the shows, Gulliver’s Travels and Casting the Runes.
Hi! First things first, how are you?
Very good thanks! Busy, as always, but I don’t really mind that. We’ve just come back from doing a show in Shanghai, which was a lot of fun, and now we’re preparing for the Fringe of course. We’re also planning for our spring tour (which will be two different shows), and starting work on two NEW shows for later next year!
In your own words, can you describe for us what your show is about?
Yes, of course. We actually have two shows this year. We’re performing them back to back, one after the other at the Pleasance Courtyard. This first one is ‘Casting the Runes’, a supernatural thriller based on the stories of M.R. James, the grandfather of British horror – we performed it at the Fringe last year and it went down incredibly well, it’s been touring the UK since then and has gathered an array of fantastic reviews. The second show is ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, based on the classic novel by Jonathan Swift, an amazing adventure featuring a huge range of puppetry and original sea shanties – we’ve performed it around the UK and taken it to the US and Malta, again receiving outstanding reactions and reviews!
And if you were to condense that into three words, what would they be?
For ‘Casting the Runes’? Scary puppet thriller! For ‘Gulliver’s Travels’? Seafaring puppet adventure! In general? Beautiful seamless storytelling.
What has preparation for the Fringe looked like for you so far?
We’ve been bringing work to the Fringe for a while, so we’re quite well practised when it comes to the preparation now. There’s a lot of hats to wear and a lot of different things to cover. We’ve found accommodation (an increasingly tricky job every year), prepared marketing, built sets, planned transport, written risk assessments, arranged insurance, programmed tech and many, many other logistical jobs. And then of course we’re actually rehearsing the shows!
What do you want audiences to take away from seeing your show?
If you like good theatre, I think you’ll enjoy our work. There’s a huge amount of creativity and invention on display. If you’re up for something a bit different, I think the unique puppetry, the transforming sets and the storytelling will really get your attention. People often tell us they’ve never seen anything quite like it! Finally if you’re a fan o f the original stories I hope you’ll be blown away by what we’ve done to bring them to life on stage.
How did you come up with the concept of your performance?
Gulliver’s Travels’ was actually a commission, we were asked to create the show by the Clark Memorial Library UCLA. It was a huge challenge, people hear ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and they think it’s a children’s story – it really, REALLY isn’t! I’m very proud of what we created – we wanted to transport the audience, take them along on this incredible voyage with us, keeping the humour, satire and magic of the original novel. From what people tell us, I think we’ve done a pretty good job.
‘Casting the Runes’ was our own choice, partly because we’d dabbled in the gothic in an earlier show and really wanted to make a proper ghost story. It’s a great fit for a smaller cast, it helps to create a sense of isolation, and we use a lot of puppetry too of course, as we do in all our shows. It’s probably the adaptation where we’ve made the most alterations from the original – we’ve changed some characters and worked in elements from James’ other stories – but it’s gone down incredibly well with M.R.James fans everywhere, so I think we’ve still captured the essence of the original!
Edinburgh Fringe is certainly an incredibly busy event, what are you most looking forward to doing whilst there?
I’ve been going to the Festival for a long time, I’ve performed there every year since I was sixteen. By now I know the city pretty well and I know a lot of people there, whether local or those who come for the Fringe. So I always look forward to seeing friends, and also to meeting new ones! There are so many amazing, inspiring people around, and so many brilliant shows, I always leave full of ideas and enthusiasm!
Where can people catch your show this summer?
Both shows will be at the Fringe for the whole Festival, at the Pleasance Courtyard from the 31st July to the 25th August. ‘Casting the Runes’ is on at 11:35am and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is on at 1pm.
And where can people follow your work?
You can find us on all the usual platforms, and we’re BoxTaleSoup on everything, so search for that and you’ll find us on IG, TikTok and so on. If you visit boxtalesoup.co.uk you can find out more about the shows, and even watch some of our work online.
And if you look for us on YouTube you’ll find trailers for the shows along with a load of vlogs about how we make everything!
Finally, what would be your dream venue or theatre to perform at?
That’s actually a tricky question I think, as we’re always looking forward to the next goal. I would love to see our work in a great London theatre – I think it would work really well in the Globe! I studied in Manchester and lived there for 15 years, so the Royal Exchange would be brilliant. And although we’ve taken our work to the US, we’ve never performed in New York, so it would be fantastic to find a venue there, I think what we do would go down really well.
SHOW LINK: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/events?keywords=box%20tale%20soup
TWITTER / X ACCOUNT: @BoxTaleSoup
INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT: @BoxTaleSoup
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