Heart of Darkness

It's been six years since Tom Basden won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer, and four since his satirical play Party won a Fringe First. In the meantime, the writer and comedian—who first came to Edinburgh as a member of sketch group Cowards alongside Tim Key, Lloyd Woolf and Stefan Golaszewski—has cemented his name as one of the country's top comic writing talents, contributing to Channel 4's Peep Show and Fresh Meat, and most recently creating Plebs for ITV2.

But Holes—his first Edinburgh show since Party—doesn't exactly sound funny from the off. Three colleagues and a teenage girl are the sole survivors of a plane crash and, stranded on a desert island, are forced to learn how to survive.

"It's not an out and out comedy in the style of something like Party," Basden explains. "It's meant to be funny and the characters are meant to be comic but some of the action goes to quite an extreme place. I guess it's in the tradition of something like Lord of the Flies, looking at the way that people behave in a crisis."

"The play is very stealthy," says director Phillip Breen, who also directed Party.  "It's a satire and rolls down a very familiar groove stretching back to The Tempest and Gulliver's Travels.

"I would say that the comedy works in a similar way to Beckett or Pinter. There's a dark theme to it certainly. In some ways, the humour is similar to The Life of Brian, which is essentially about a bunch of people being crucified but it's very, very funny."

Produced by The Invisible Dot, Holes will take place in a top-secret location and both writer and director aren't giving any clues away. But Breen admits, "We're taking people to a place in which we can do something that we couldn't do anywhere else in Edinburgh," and Basden—who originally wrote the play for the National Theatre but had to scrap it when the proposed venue changed—is just pleased the play is happening at all. "I didn't think anyone would be stupid enough to put it on," he laughs, "because it does involve a shit ton of sand. It's like a huge sandpit really."

Basden will be in China when Holes premieres in Edinburgh, but he's confident his play is in good hands. The excellent cast features comedian Katy Wix (who also starred in Party), Horrible Histories' Matthew Baynton, acclaimed young actress Bebe Cave and Daniel Rigby, a BAFTA-winner for his performance in the BBC's Eric and Ernie but perhaps most recognisable as the current face of BT. And Breen, recently lauded for directing the RSC's The Merry Wives of Windsor has an impeccable Fringe track-record, having  in addition to Party directed 2008 Fringe First-winner Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved and Humphrey Ker's Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show in 2011.

"Tom's the greatest joke writer around, I think," says Breen. "It's like getting the first Stoppards. What I love about Tom's writing is the fact that it's very funny, it's very theatrical, has a great rhythm but it's always ultimately about something."

And that something in this case is the limits of human behaviour. "I'm quite interested in stories where society breaks down," Basden says. "Like during Hurricane Katrina there were people who were committing these horrendous acts of individual crime and abuse on each other, when they were all penned into the sports stadium and fighting for survival. And I was interested in what it would take to get relatively normal people to that point. The play is, I guess, an attempt to chart how very mundane-seeming people can get to the point where they're doing absolutely awful things to each other."

"It is a comedy," Basden insists. Then he laughs, "but the audience might end up being a bit brutalised by it. It depends on what they're into really. Hopefully there'll be at least some laughter before the screams of horror."