Creating (way) outside the mainstream, and finding a place, a home, an audience, and inspiration in Canada at the Fringe: a story of two original pond-crossing theatre artists. Part 2: Dead Rabbits Theatre (“Tiger Lady”). 

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Before we get to the lady and the tiger, here’s a Fringe story. It hinges on one of those unpredictable moments that turn out, in retrospect, to seem prophetic and pivotal. “Listen, there is this amazing festival in Edmonton…. You must go there.”

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

That’s what the Polish-born English theatre artist Kasia Zaremba-Byrne, the head of the acting program at St. Mary’s University in London, heard in 2016 from an English company that had been touring, and won awards, on the American Fringe circuit. So she started a company. And, to shorten these origin story segués even further, the London-based international touring company Dead Rabbits Theatre got themselves “a funny poster,” and set forth across the Atlantic.

The company was born at the Edmonton Fringe that year, with “the first show we ever made.” Playful, tragi-comic, theatrically ingenious, The Dragon was based on an anti-Stalinist 1943 folk tale/satire. “We didn’t know anyone,” then word got out. “ It was a fantastic experience for us. We were ecstatic!”

My Love Lies Frozen In The Ice, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

“We went again to Edmonton in 2017,” Zaremba-Byrne says, with  My Love Lies Frozen, created from the true story of a 19th century expedition, male of course, to the North Pole — told from the perspective of the woman they left behind at home. And again, the Dead Rabbits had a wonderful time. “We loved the volunteers; we loved speaking to people there. Everyone was really kind.”

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

COVID has been cruel, to say the least, to international touring companies. So Tiger Lady was two years in the making before its Edinburgh Fringe debut of 2022 (which came with a Fringe First citation). It’s based on the true story of a young Kentucky orphan girl in 1913. As Zaremba-Byrne describes, Mabel Stark, the world’s first female tiger-tamer, escaped through her aunt’s window at night, joined the circus, “and fell in love with a tiger.”  She discovered the story, by accident in a book, and was struck by “a wonderful life that suggests life turns on the smallest of things and how strange and unpredictable it is.”

Quirky name notwithstanding, the company began in “a quest to make theatre that connects people through play, through music, through movement, through the joy of life,” says the Dead Rabbits artistic director and founder. “And to share stories of the way of the underdog….”

Not coincidentally, “quite a few are from the woman’s perspective.” says Zaremba-Byrne, who often finds her inspiration in true stories. “True stories hold quite a lot of magic moments…. Life, as they say, is stranger than fiction.”

As a professor of acting, she’s well-connected to young talent, and keeps in touch long after they graduate, she says. “The shows are made partly from the stories, and partly from (the actors’) ownership of the characters.” The roles are custom-made. And the question “so are you the playwright?” is “complicated,” she laughs.

“It’s a collaboration. I like to say the company is the playwright…. We work a lot through play, through finding pleasure, finding fun.” And the signature Dead Rabbits mingling of dark and light, comedy and tragedy in the shows “reflects life, because life is chaotic. We try to find the play between them, to find the cares of life inside.”

Zaremba-Byrne herself “works a lot in movement” (she trained with the French theatre artist Philippe Collier). “And a lot of my work is driven by the visual, by music…. Sometimes I get enchanted….” Her husband Alex Byrne, who has a theatre company, too — the much-travelled NIE (New International Company) with offices across Europe — “sometimes helps with the writing.” Though her English is excellent and expressive, Zaremba-Byrne’s first language is Polish.

In The Dragon we saw what inventive theatre artists could do with a clothesline, ladders, sheets and atmospheric music and lighting. Ditto My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice. That kind of bare-stage theatricality, says Zaremba-Byrne, speaks to “the principle of being simple…. It’s a way of connecting with the audience,” inviting them to participate imaginatively in the storytelling.

“It’s part of the magic.” And that kind of theatrical magic is pure Fringe.

Did you see Part 1, Cameryn Moore (“muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing”)? It’s here.

Tiger Lady runs Friday through Aug. 27 at the Fringe (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre). Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.