PISS AND BILE at The Space Theatre

Aim

Help us raise money for our play, PISS AND BILE! Performed at The Space in March 2022.

We are Five Pigeons Pecking a Bin Bag, an emerging Theatre company hoping to raise £1850 to fund our debut play: PISS AND BILE.

About PISS AND BILE:

PISS AND BILE is a hilarious play about being sad in your 20’s. It follows two mates who have left the safety of full-time education, hate their waitressing jobs and sometimes hate each other. Woman 1 applies for a beep boop business job. She doesn’t get it. Woman 2 secretly applies for the job too. She gets it. The tension is high and the competition is on. Can their friendship survive in a world that fosters apathy, complacency and cruelty?

Woman 1 has lost The Will. She finds thinking about the world pretty overwhelming, so she’d rather not think about anything at all. Working at the restaurant isn't the dream but she seems to be stuck there, unable to find her passion. While Woman 2 may have also lost The Will, the promise of leaving her current job is keeping her going. Woman 2 is ready for a big change but doesn’t quite know what that change should be. She’s been pressured into the corporate world out of fear of being left behind.

Beth and Daniella wrote this play as a response to their experiences of post-University depression, and Beth’s experience of the service industry and gig economy. We want to provide escapism from the gruelling transition period that is our twenties and to create some silly entertainment after a time where it has been scarce. 

About the company:

Five Pigeons Pecking a Bin Bag is an emerging theatre company, set up and led by artistic directors; Beth Wilson and Daniella Finch. We’re an acting and writing duo that started our theatre company together at the end of 2019. We strive to make theatre that unites audiences through a collective experience and we believe comedy is the best way to make people feel less alone. As a company, we create work that asks the big, uncomfortable questions and explores the unsavoury bits of humanity - work that is bold, foul-humoured and a little bit weird.

We have been developing our first play, PISS AND BILE, over the last year. We’ve performed it at various online sharing’s for invited audiences, such as with the Dramatists Guild, Just Some Theatre and The Space. We also presented an extract of the play with The National Student Drama Festival where we received dramaturgical support and mentorship from their associate artists, filmed PISS AND BILE and shared it on their Zoom platform with an invited audience. This gave us further opportunities to develop the piece and learn as performers while expanding our network. The next step is putting PISS AND BILE on for a live audience. 

Why do we need your help?

As we are an emerging theatre company, we are still establishing ourselves in the industry. We want to be able to pay our creative team fairly for their time and commitment to our project. Any donations we receive will  go towards paying our team ,as well as paying for set, props and costume. We also have an ambitious lighting design, distinguishing between three levels of reality (meta) to represent the characters deteriorating mental states as the play spirals. We are hoping to hire a lighting designer to help us achieve our exciting goals. 

PISS AND BILE aims to raise awareness of how little attention is paid to mental health in the gig economy. Donating to our project or even sharing this page will help us spread our reach and connect to more people to encourage people to open up and talk to their peers about their mental health and the impact that post-university depression and working in the service industry can have on our generation. 

If we raise £50 we can pay for the licensing to get some banging tunes in our show 

If we raise £175 we’ll be able to be some props beat each other up with

If we raise £410 we’ll be able to pay for our tech

If we raise £601 we can pay ourselves back for rehearsal space

Why should I care?

Great question. PISS AND BILE topically explores the gruelling impact of working a 0-hours contract job in the service industry, and how this can have negative impacts on our mental wellbeing; from feeling as if you aren’t progressing in a career, to the pressures that come with being a part of the rat race mentality. This is something we want to get people discussing. PISS AND BILE scrutinises the lack of a support structure as we mature into ‘adults’ and so we hope to encourage audiences to open up about their mental wellbeing. We think this is an important play and with your help, want to share it with as many people as possible to encourage people to talk about their mental health.

Our aim to raise awareness of post-graduate depression and the lack of mental health support in the gig economy beyond the show feels especially poignant now. Having gone through a global pandemic, the service industry, and those who work in it, have severely suffered. We also want to start a conversation and provide a network of people to normalise the overwhelming pressure of succeeding after graduating. We aim to decentralise the university experience as the only valid path to success or happiness and we believe PISS AND BILE sheds light on this distressing period of young people's lives.  

More information:

To read more about PISS AND BILE and book tickets to the show click here.

Follow us on social media to get updates on how the project is developing:

Twitter: @5_pigeons

Instagram: @5pigeons_peckingabinbag  

Rewards:

£10 - you will get the magic fuzzy feeling in your tummy when you do something nice. You will also receive a shoutout thank you on our social media

£15 - you will receive the fuzzy feeling, a tweet shout out and an insult video from one of the waitresses in the show

£25 - you will receive the fuzzy feeling, a tweet shout out, an insult video and a behind the scenes personalised ‘thank you’ video message from the PISS AND BILE cast 

£50 - you will receive the fuzzy feeling, a tweet shout out, an insult video, a personalised video from the PISS AND BILE cast and and a signed poster

£100 - you will receive all the above, plus a digital print from the graphic Designer behind the poster for PISS AND BILE, signed by the cast 

£300 - all of the above and discounted tickets to the show 

Thank you for all your donations and please come and see PISS AND BILE at The Space Theatre

This project successfully funded on 2nd April 2022