The Brunch Club
Levels Cafe Edinburgh and UWS Cafe Ayr
August-September 2019
A homage to coming of age movies and in particular John Hughes’ 1985 masterpiece The Breakfast Club, the show, written and directed by Ben, took the archetypes of Popular, Jock, Nerd, Goth and Rebel and updated them to the 2019 archetypes of Spice Boy, Emo, Queen Bee, Popular Sidekick, Ned, Geek, Rebel and Vegan Activist.
Staged in two different student cafes in Edinburgh and Ayr, the action of the film was updated in age of character too, to the fresher’s week of a college. The characters responded to a call to ‘create your own detention’ for their own distinctive reasons. Confronting each other over issues of sex, alcohol and drug use, the environment, and human intimacy, over the course of a night new and unlikely alliances are made.
Featuring a history lesson of the entire invention of cliques from the 1940s to the present day, the piece challenged the damaging aspects of archetypes as well as portraying the characters with great humour and compassion.
The show won the Scottish Arts Club Award ‘Bright Spark Award’ for emerging artists. The cast and crew of The Brunch Club were drawn from a workshop and audition programme involving over 150 young people from across Scotland, in association with the Scottish Drama Training Network. The project in Edinburgh was supported by Pleasance Futures.