Award-winning comedian, actor, and director Jonathan Oldfield is making his solo Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut this summer.
Known in the comedy industry for directing Joe Kent-Waters’ breakout hit Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! (winner of Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards last year) and collaborating with Lorna Rose Treen, Oldfield is stepping out from the back of the room and onto the stage.
His debut solo show, Exquisite Corpse, is a live comedy experiment taking place at the Pleasance Courtyard. The show is inspired by Oldfield’s own unusual relationship with his body, having broken the same arm seven separate times and survived meningitis twice, as well as his upbringing as a “third culture kid” across Mexico, Thailand, South Korea, and France. Using the premise of the surrealist drawing game, Oldfield uses audience interaction to construct mismatched, bizarre characters on the fly.
Beyond the comedy circuit, sci-fi fans might also recognise Oldfield from his role as Joydali in season two of Star Wars: Andor.
We caught up with Jonathan to discuss physical vulnerability, navigating strict lore versus chaotic comedy, and what it is like to perform in a subterranean space in Edinburgh.
The Oldfield Q&A
Pleasance Courtyard: Below is a subterranean space, and a 9:40 pm slot means your audience arrives fully energised by the festival atmosphere. When people step off the dark Edinburgh cobbles and into that specific room, what is the first sensory impression you want them to hit? How do you use the lighting and audio to separate your space from the outdoor chaos?
There’s nothing better than the feeling of walking into a Fringe venue – that specific mix of anticipation and complete uncertainty about what’s about to happen. I’m a very visual person, so from the moment the audience walks in there’ll be some atmospheric lighting and a large set piece on stage – a sort of machine that forms the basis of the whole show, which I won’t spoil here (you’ll have to book a ticket to find out…) Plus, I’ll play some banging songs. It’s extremely important to have good music on as people walk into the room.
Geek Native readers love systems with strict rules, but your show relies on the chaotic, blind assembly of Exquisite Corpse. When the audience hands you completely unpredictable, mismatched variables to build a character on the fly, how do you keep the internal logic of the story from collapsing?
I love rules too – the question I’ve been interested in lately is: what happens when the rules themselves invite chaos? The rules of Exquisite Corpse don’t ask for sense. They ask for surprise. For me, in live comedy especially, game and logic are helpful ingredients, but they’re not the whole dish. I’m also extremely interested in surprising, tricking, and occasionally completely confounding an audience. There’s a very fine line between mayhem and mess and I spend a lot of time on that line, trying to not fall over. Or if I do fall over, doing it in a funny way, hopefully.
You play Joydali in season two of Star Wars: Andor. In the expanded universe, even minor background characters end up with deep lore and dedicated wiki pages. Did navigating the strict, highly detailed worldbuilding of a galaxy far, far away change how you physically assemble or “try on” your own bizarre characters for the stage?
What I took from being in Star Wars: Andor was just how much care and attention it takes to keep an expanded universe alive. Every single department was working at the absolute top of their game and the detail was staggering. I’ve definitely carried that with me. The idea that the wild, stupid ideas are worth taking seriously. That characters (however bizarre) deserve joy, care, and genuine attention to detail. Obviously, it’s a bit of a shift between imperial officer and ‘man who visited every zizzis in the UK’ but it’s worth treating them with the same diligent focus, I think.
Beyond acting in Andor, you are stepping into a festival ecosystem packed with gaming, sci-fi, and alternative comedy culture. How much of a geek are you in your daily life when you aren’t on stage or set, and does that personal fandom filter into the subtext of your comedy?
I think everyone is a geek in their own way. The question is just what you’re a geek about. Onstage, I like making short form, fast moving sketch and character comedy and I think that filters into his life off stage as well. I’ll often get obsessed with something for a short while and then move onto something else. I had 6 months where I played table tennis almost every day. I got pretty geeky about that. Then I moved onto playing a game where you pretended to run a democracy. I have no idea why, it just happened. All of these things filter into my comedy, but mostly in ways I can never spot consciously.
Your show openly explores a body that has experienced significant vulnerability, including breaking the same arm seven separate times. Given Edinburgh’s notoriously steep hills, vertical stairs, and slick rainy cobbles in August, does the literal layout of the capital bring any fresh pre-show anxiety to your performance prep?
Luckily, I went to university in Edinburgh, so I’ve had many years learning to traverse that terrain – mostly in worse conditions than August, and mostly with less at stake. I’ll be taking it very easy on the walk in. I haven’t broken my arm in eighteen years and I’m not about to let a wet cobblestone near Pleasance Courtyard be the thing that ends the run.
You directed Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! to a Best Newcomer win last year, and your work with Lorna Rose Treen is legendary in the comedy community. How does the psychological pressure change when you stop directing the action from the back of the room and stand alone on stage as the sole target for the local critics?
In the early 2000s I stumbled across an old man living next to a watermill. When he offered me a drop of barley wine, I couldn’t refuse. 3 glasses later and he showed me into his laboratory. It was here where he told me he could remove my brain and alter it. I don’t know why, maybe it was the wine, or the smell of his thatched roof, but I agreed. When I woke hours later, I could no longer feel fear. I am now impervious to psychological pressure. Any criticism or judgement of me and my work goes completely unnoticed. I tried to thank that old man one day, but strangely when I went to find him he was no longer there. And neither was the watermill.
As a third culture kid raised across Mexico, Thailand, South Korea, and France, your identity is built around rapid adaptation. When you embed yourself in Edinburgh for the month of August, do you find yourself absorbing local traits and Scottish vocabulary, or does the city just feel like another transient backdrop for the performance?
Edinburgh in August can sometimes feel like its own country. The permanent residents have either left or barricaded themselves indoors to avoid the flyers and high-school productions of King Lear, and what’s left is this temporary nation of performers and audiences. I lived there for 4 years during a very formative time in my life, so it’s hard not to feel nostalgic whenever I’m back in Edinburgh, but I’m also canny enough to know (as an Englishman) that I’m certainly not claiming to absorb any Scottishness whilst I’m there. Although having said that, I do frequently use the word “dreich” so I must have absorbed some vocabulary.
The character comedy and solo performance scene at the Fringe is incredibly crowded this year. What is the one specific story or physical risk you are taking in Exquisite Corpse that no other performer in the city would dare to try at that time of night?
If you can name another performer who is doing a live diabolo demonstration onstage, then I’ll eat my hat (and my diabolo).
The press release notes that the original Exquisite Corpse game emerged after World War I as artists grappled with a fractured world. Does performing a show about fragmented identities inside a historic, centuries-old Edinburgh vault change how that underlying subtext feels to you as a performer?
The rooms in Edinburgh always add something. I once did a performance inside the back of a van on Grassmarket – it wasn’t pleasant, but it certainly changed the atmosphere. Below at Pleasance has a particular quality to it, something underground and slightly held-in, which I think suits a show about things that have been buried and reassembled.
The art of spoiling the performance: In theatre, “corpsing” means completely ruining a scene by breaking character and laughing out loud. If a piece of audience interaction goes entirely off the rails and forces you to corpse on stage, what would the dream headline-grabbing chaotic quote look like for the morning papers?
Laughing Corpse Creates Comedy Chaos
Thank you, Jonathan!
Jonathan Oldfield: Exquisite Corpse runs at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from the 5th to the 30th of August (excluding the 17th) at Pleasance Courtyard: Below (9:40 PM). You can find more details and book tickets directly through the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Box Office.
To find out more about Jonathan’s work, visit his official website.
