Creative Scotland Crowdmatch has provided £599 of match funding
MOTORWAY - EDINBURGH FRINGE
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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Aim
We need help raising a small portion of funds to take our beloved extraterrestrial, dark comedy thriller 'Motorway' to the Edinburgh Fringe.
THE PLAY
‘Motorway’ is a new play exploring complex female friendship, rural isolation and a disgusting love triangle through the story of two best friends working night shifts at a service station. Darkly comic with moments of unsettling hilarity, the play exudes a new Lynchian approach to theatre making.
A play deeply special to us, ‘Motorway’ was birthed at a strange, paranoiac rave on a sleepless night; Abigail wanted to write a play about aliens and Daniel wanted to write a play set in a service station.
“I’ve been watching the motorway for many hours. watching the white lines, people in their cars, hidden away from others, on their own private journey.”
OUR WORK
The pair have a shared love of the uncanny and eccentric, and have a great desire to make these wonderful concepts more accessible through truthful and strangely relatable characters. This is what lies at the heart of our work - AND A DAMN FINE STORY… The familiar slips into the strange, the settled is unsettled, and artistically the fringe will be the duo establishing their weird to the masses.
Developed at East 15’s new writing festival ‘Launch’ (Charlie Josephine, Christopher Brett Bailey, Fat Rascal) the play first gained recognition for its unique, uncanny style and shocking storyline. It then went onto a sold-out London debut at the Etcetera Theatre.
One respected person in the theatre world said it was:
“The most inspiring piece of theatre I’ve ever seen.”
…But you’ll just have to take our word for it.
OVERVIEW
On the motorway, everyone is on their own private journey. But Maeve and Lucy exist on the side of it, working night shifts at a service station; a liminal, eerie place to stop for a coffee.
No one ever comes in.
When only one of the friends is given the gift of an extraterrestrial encounter, jealousy leads to a violent meltdown in friendship. A chiller night-drug piss play.
Having worked and devised together closely over four years, Daniel Cuckow and Abigail Sinclair have refined a stylistic bond and otherworldly style of alternative theatre-making.
THE COMPANY & CREATIVES
Daniel Cuckow is an actor and theatre-maker. His work draws on folk tradition and reimagines the strange zones of Britain’s cultural history for contemporary audiences. He trained on the Acting & Contemporary Theatre course at East 15 Acting School and was chosen to train on Wise Children’s Summer Residency before taking up Morris dancing shortly afterwards.
He is co-creative director of The Garden Theatre, a new fringe theatre in Loughton, Essex.
Abigail Sinclair is a Scottish actress and theatre-maker. Her work is inspired by her bizarre life experiences and an impulse to bring horror to the stage. She trained on the Acting & Contemporary Theatre course at East 15 Acting School on scholarship from the Donald Dewar Award, and is a recipient of the Sir John Gielgud Award. Abigail is also a junior sommelier ;)
Holly Demaine is a theatre maker, performer and designer from the North of Ireland. She completed a Foundation degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster before completing a BA in Acting from East 15 but is mainly self taught in fabrication. She has a passion for kinetic sculpture and puppetry and the theatrical value that adornment brings to performance.
She is co-creative director of The Garden Theatre.
BROWN SIGN NOSTALGIA
“Motorways heralded an optimistic vision of progress, of transport for all. Towers, bridges and service stations, two of which have just been listed by English Heritage, define the moment when road travel captured the public imagination and motorways were full of futuristic glamour…” - In the Company of Ghosts
For me, the service station is a place of bittersweet nostalgia. A fragment of the past that contains some lost, childhood feeling of joy and pure pleasure. They weren’t amazing, adventure-filled places to a child, but they were a surprise; and much better than the canteen at school. The service station was more of a diner then, more of an experience. Not the same shit carnival of fast food chains that we see now. These places had a smell and a sound to them. And don’t you remember that feeling of spotting a brown sign on the motorway, or the little man smiling in his lovely little chef hat in the distance? Amazing.
Now that you’re older though, the service station (assuming you have a car) is just a place that’s going to cost you money. A place of unsociable, anonymous, other-space dread.
£12 for that slab of frankenchicken in a bun. And you must pay more to fill that tank halfway - although, you could have sworn it cost the same amount to fill the whole thing 2 years ago?
What happened to the diners?
What happened to my childlike wonder?
What happens in these non-place, advertisement bombed zones at night?
“I think the service station is the perfect place to be abducted by aliens.”
HOW WILL THE FUNDS BE USED?
We have already paid for venue hire through a loan (thank god my brother is a sparky) which we HOPE to make back in ticket sales. We really, really believe in this show and its uniqueness and are confident we will get bums on seats BUT, and this is the but. Having these funds will assist us massively and decrease stress. They will help us really be ambitious with the outreach of our show and help us not go bankrupt (literally). If we can reach our goal, the funds will solely be used to cover our accommodation and transport.
Overall, our Fringe debut will be costing us around £8,000, a palpation inducing but realistic sum and investment for our dreams to come true.<3
We are funding and self-producing this petrol headed beast together! Taking on all marketing and production duties including: being our own PR team, sending those hundreds of invitations to reviewers and industry members, sourcing all the little things that make the magic of theatre, transporting our beloved canteen set, and most importantly: ENSURING our brilliant piece of theatre gets to be witnessed by the masses.
It is truly important that those we love, hate, and admire get to see this show, and how special that we get to do this in Scotland, the best land. Abigail left Scotland to study at East 15, so bringing this play conceived in the final months of their study back to her home is integral for her creative ethics.
Scotland only having one drama school means that many Scottish creatives move to London for their studies / future, but it does not mean that Scotland doesn’t deserve brilliant plays and performers from its homeland to be showcased there. We are passionate about bringing new theatre to Scotland, hot out of the oven.
Abigail will cry a lot taking this play home, she will put Dan in a kilt, and he will cry too, for the love of the play, the land, and the THEATRE.
Every donation no matter how tiny or how massive is so gratefully received, your kindness will not be missed and is going towards exciting new work from new creatives, at the beginning of our careers.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read.
Abigail and Daniel x
Funding method
All or nothing – this project will only receive pledges if it reaches its target of £2,000 by 19th August 2026 at 2:22pm