Lightning Rod Special Presents LIONS at Edinburgh Fringe International Premiere

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Written and performed by Scott R. Sheppard and Alice Yorke, LIONS will play Tech Cube Zero at Summerhall.

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The Fringe First winners and creators of The Appointment (New Yorker Best of 2023) will return with a sweaty moustache of a comedy about the business of letting their dads die. With a dose of Kafka and 'A Christmas Carol,' Lions (8 Best Shows at Philadelphia Fringe) disassembles the myths their fathers told themselves about what it means to be a great man. Enter a world of breathing machines, Christmas ghosts, to-do lists, shirts that smell like grass, and the most romantic disappointments of their fathers' lives. Performances will run 6-30 August.

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While trying to make a show about money with Sarah Blush, both Sheppard and Yorke lost their fathers in sudden and unexpected ways within fourteen months. Yorke's father, a lifelong cyclist, suffered a severe head injury when he was unexpectedly hit by a car on his bicycle. Sheppard's father became sick with an extreme pneumonia connected to the long term effects of radiation therapy for a cancer he overcame twenty-three years earlier. As these medical emergencies turned tragic, Yorke and Sheppard were plunged into weeks of repetitive uncertainty. They found themselves suspended, sleeping in hospitals, sorting through mounds of belongings, throwing out trays of bagels, trying desperately to make meaning and order out of their situation. They eventually realised that this was what their show needed to be about.

Co-writer and performer Scott Sheppard said: "I am someone who is allergic to sentimentality and autobiography in the theatre. So, the dare of this piece for Alice and I was to make a play about the deaths of our fathers in a way we had never seen before. We focused on the business of death: the routines, the logistics, the unexpected micro dramas that hold the weight of an entire person's legacy. The secrets. The failures. The ways masculinity elevates and disfigures the truth about these men who were obsessed with their failures."

Co-writer and performer Alice Yorke said: "Scott and I had been planning on making a two-hander for years, and started working on a new piece shortly after the death of his father. We spent months on that material and even presented it in a public showing. When my father died four months later, we scrapped every bit of it and headed in a new direction. All of us will experience the loss of our parents at some point in our lives and then have to reckon with their totality - we wanted to lionize these men, yes, but also to remember them the way they were: flawed and finicky."

Director Sarah Blush said: “I'm grateful to have been invited into Alice and Scott's devising process, central to which is the search for what they call the “lightning rod”: the thing at the center of the work that feels almost too hot to touch. With this show, the search for that conductor took the entire multi-year process, up until one day before our first performance. We'd thought that lightning rod was subverting eulogy, for Alice and Scott to bravely pinpoint and expose their dads' shames and failures, to make a dead dad show unafraid to be unflattering. But we realized that more dangerous than painting an unbecoming portrait of a loved one, or even grappling with death itself, is one's own vanity being compromised. Lions does introduce us to Alice and Scott's dads, in all of their beautiful triumphs and disappointments, but it is sneakily a show about Alice and Scott's own fears and desires, and how hard it is to live up to the standards we set for ourselves.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/scotland/article/LIONS-by-Lightning-Rod-Special-to-Make-International-Premiere-at-Edinburgh-Fringe-20260608)._