Pop music meets poetry in this new monologue about city lights, queer night life and large seafaring birds. Blending music, dance, and stand up, this explosive queer monologue tells a provocative story about one young person asking impossible questions: why am I like this? Who made sushi so expensive? And, are the straights okay?
Don’t Shoot the Albatross is sort of a monologue, kind of a pop song, and a bit like a poem. It’s about urban isolation, queer exceptionalism and social anxiety, but mostly it’s about Alby and why they can’t sleep at night. The piece flickers between poetic, musical and acerbic.
As Alby walks through the city, plugged into their headphones, the music in their ears merges with the noises of the city at night. Alby is smart, funny and charming, but we get the sense that they are uncomfortable with themselves, that they are talking so they don’t have to think, listening to music to avoid confronting themselves and the reality of the world around them.
Don’t Shoot the Albatross interrogates identity and self-loathing. It’s about how we build identities for ourselves, and the ways in which we can get stuck in them. It is both funny and confronting, asking big questions about trauma, queerness and self-hatred. Think Gen Z Fleabag meets Imogen Heap in a psychodrama. Or Laura Mvula has dinner with Kae Tempest and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Don’t Shoot the Albatross premiered as a research and development piece as part of Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts’ IGNITE Festival 2022, and was performed at ZOO Playground as part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2022. Formed in Oxford in 2019 by Sam Woof and recently announced as the inaugural ArtsLab Graduate Company at the North Wall Arts Centre, and winners of a Special Award by Musical Theatre Review at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2022, GOYA are an exciting new theatre company creating young, queer, music theatre.
Writer/Performer/Composer: Sam Woof
Director: Sam Edmund
Producers: Mrinmoyee Roy and Lowri Spear
★★★★★ The Wee Review – “This is an impactful and memorable story of queer identity, victimhood, and self-forgiveness […] Sam Woof is a gifted writer and performer and it feels like we’ve witnessed something very special”
★★★★★ Musical Theatre Review – “Mark my words, Sam Woof is going to be a strong voice […] in years to come”
