About Fearless Players
Fearless Players are an up and coming, female-led theatre company. We provide a platform for brilliant female creatives to tell the stories of awesome women.
Fearless Players are a group of actors, writers and theatre-makers collaborating to create new, innovative and fearless theatre. We enjoy pushing the boundaries of theatre and creating work that excites and intrigues. We met at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and created the company after graduating in 2017.
In 2018 we took our first show, Armour: A Herstory of the Scottish Bard to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received 4 and 5 star reviews from publications like, The Stage, Musical Theatre Review and The List among others. We were nominated for Best Music Show by Broadway World. We performed and were interviewed on BBC Scotland Radio's The Afternoon Show. The Stage named us one of the Top Picks of the fringe before we opened and after Paul Vale gave us a 4 star review we were named one of the Top Musicals of the Fringe. We were named a Must See by The Daily Record and Three to see by Three Weeks and we were also a featured interview on Broadway Baby.
This year we are back with Armour: A Herstory of the Scottish Bard and its sister show, Burns: A Lost Legacy. Burns is a piece about the youngest character in Armour, Sarah Burns, and how, inspired by her Granny Jean, she fought for the Burns legacy.
If you fancy a nosy you can find out more about us on our website.
Burns: A Lost Legacy
How much of your future would you sacrifice in order to preserve the past? Sarah Burns is a mother and a wife, but in 1865 she gave up her life in Australia to return to her life in Britain. The granddaughter of Scottish poet Robert Burns and his wife Jean, Sarah is the forgotten guardian of her family’s legacy and it is due to her efforts that the world remembers Robert Burns with so much fondness. But what did Sarah have to sacrifice in order to preserve a memory that was not her own and when all is said and done, was the sacrifice worth the outcome?
Our story follows Sarah Burns on her journey to Australia with her husband and children and tells of the grief she experiences along the way. Despite her husband’s efforts to make the best of their new life in Australia, Sarah struggles to bond with her new daughter and an irrational fear of young Annie dying begins to take root. Back in Britain, Sarah’s younger sister is struggling to protect the Burns legacy from those who wish to steal from and misremember it. Torn between her new life in Australia and her determination to protect her granny's legacy, Sarah sets off to join her sister and leaves Australia behind. But how does this affect the family she leaves behind and will she live to regret her choice to protect the legacy of a man she has never met?
Armour: A Herstory of the Scottish Bard
Armour: A Herstory of the Scottish Bard is a musical story told by the granddaughter of Robert Burns. At a time in life when she needs her granny most, Sarah Burns returns to see her granny Jean. Through Sarah’s memories we learn about Jean Armour, wife of Robert Burns, and his mistress Nancy MacLehose, and what happened when Jean and Nancy finally met for tea, 30 years after Rab’s death. Jean and Nancy inspired some of Burns’ most famous work and after years of songs being written about them it’s time for their story to be told. Using the well-known music of Robert Burns woven in with original composition, Herstory gives a voice to the women behind the Bard.
“Armour is an exceptionally mature piece of writing. It’s sentimental without being schmaltzy, and is underscored with a strong, feminist message that’s as valid today as it was then”
Paul Vale, The Stage
Who Run the World?
2018 was a year of movements and women speaking up and with the rise of #MeToo and #TimesUp, the winds of representation in the industry are changing!
So many brilliant writers, producers, cinematographers, directors, actors (you name it) have not been afforded the opportunities that their male counterparts have been but no longer!
It is 2019 and the winds of change are gale-force! What you may not know is that the same problem in the UK Theatre Industry. A 2017 study by The Stage analysed the data on all the musicals that ran on the west end for 3-weeks or longer between 2007 and 2017.
The figures are... well... disappointing.
Out of 118 Musicals:
88 – Number of musicals with an all-male writing team
3 – Number of musicals with an all-female writing team
12 – Percentage of musicals with book credited to a woman
4 – Number of scores, out of 118, entirely composed by a woman
1 – Number of scores entirely composed by a British woman
Well It's just not good enough, is it!
There is a wealth of female talent but somehow that is not being reflected in the numbers and Fearless Players are determined to be the change we want to see. So we're taking matters into our own hands.
Edinburgh Fringe
Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world. It is the place to be to premiere new work! The downside is... it's expensive!
We have to pay for:
The Venue (Gilded Balloon’s Rose Theatre Basement)
Edinburgh Fringe Society Fee
Printing for Poster and Flyers
Designers for Poster and Flyers
Gilded Balloon Brochure Fee
Insurance
Accommodation
Travel
The list goes on...
We need you to help us if we're going to get to Fringe in one piece! We'll be doing a lot of fundraising between now and August to make this happen but it's worth it to bring the work of incredible British female creatives to the biggest arts market in the world!
Rewards
We hope that you will donate because you are excited by our shows and want to see them come to fruition and because you want to help us build a platform for female creatives to do their thing!
But to sweeten the deal we've got some awesome rewards on offer including:
A place in our official Fearless Friends Gallery
Shoutouts on ALL of our Social Media to celebrate your generosity!
YOUR very own Fearless Jingle video!
Tickets to the show/s
A digital download of our Armour EP
A special mention in the programme
Official Sponsorship offer for Businesses
And of course that Warm Fuzzy Feeling you get when you make someone's day!
Thank you for your support!