Inside St Andrews' own National Student Drama Festival Selection

On the making of Moth and Dog Are Trying to Get Out

On Friday 10 April, St Andrews Art Theatre (STAAT) put on a production of Moth and Dog are Dying to Get Out at the prestigious National Student Drama Festival (NSDF) in Leicester. The company, as producer Ava Pegg-Davies explains, focuses on staging contemporary plays. “What we try to do with STAAT is have really minimalist script-driven performances that don't rely on big flamboyant props and sets, and just rely on good dialogue and really good scripts.”

The play was born from writer Aidan Monks’ research in devising methodologies. In devised theatre, scripts are developed collaboratively with the cast and creative team. The play uses mannerisms, gesture, and movement as a predominant storytelling tool, a genre known as physical theatre. 

Physical and devised theatre often work well together, as actors help shape their own characters through movement as well as dialogue, communicating emotion beyond what a traditional script can provide. Dylan Swain, who plays Dog, described his role in shaping his character: “I was involved in the beginning with the devising. I have a role in writing in that, if I think something sounds bad, I'll tell Aidan, ‘make it better!’” The sole other character in the two-hander is Moth, played by Sacha Murray-Threipland.

This collaborative process has also been shaped by staged readings and performances done while the work was still in progress. “It's becoming more and more normal to present unfinished work in public spaces, and a lot of London theatres are becoming very accommodating to work in progress,” Monks said. “Daunting and slightly demoralising as well, but having gone through that, you can see the utility. It’s brilliant.” When we spoke a week before the NSDF, the current stage of the process was, in Monks’ words, “making the play good.”

The play focuses on Moth and Dog’s relationship as they grow from seventeen-year-old boys to twenty-year-old men, dealing with repressed homosexual desire, bullying, and expectations of masculinity. “It’s dealing with the cross-fertilisation of violence and intimacy, which, in different masculine sub-cultures, has polluted a new generation of young men’s sense of self and desire,” said Monks. 

Jumping between 2017 and 2020, the play depicts a period that Monks argued is largely absent from contemporary theatre. “Covid is [talked about] in comedy a lot and that sort of stuff now, but not so much in something like this. So it's a bit of a shot in the dark, a bit of an experiment to see if that resonates, or if that's still considered cringe,” he said. For Pegg-Davies, the theme resonated. “Getting the contrast of seeing the two characters before Covid and then within the lockdown [...] you do get to see how it has really shifted how they view themselves, but also their relationships with other people and their romantic relationships. Yeah, as a young person, I find it does definitely hit hard.”

Depicting something as subtle as a three-year jump is a challenge, especially with minimalist props and sets. “I suppose the biggest question for both myself and Sacha when we're conveying two time periods is the level of maturity,” Swain explained. He described his demeanour playing a seventeen-year-old as “closed-off” and “timid.” When playing twenty, he explained, “I've become more of my own person. And so there's less of that shame and that sort of childishness [...] it's a difficult thing and something we've put a lot of thought into, making sure it's clear.”

Original tracks by Tawanda Munatsi (DJ name 908T) also helps shape this narrative. “There's a sort of through line of dance and EDM music,” Swain explained, as half of the play involves the illegal lockdown rave scene of Southern England. “That crossover between those more striking poetic images with a particular choice of music as well indicates time and transition and hopefully adds something to the emotional underpinnings of it,” Swain said. 

Moth and Dog are Dying to Get Out’s next stop is this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe, with a full month run at 10 Dome in Pleasance Dome. A thoughtfully devised work evolving with each performance, it will be exciting to see where the play will go.

Photo by Hugo Wu and graphics by Elena Koestel Santamaria