Camden Fringe Interview: Cellar Door on TAPE

Three Truths, One Motel Room: Cellar Door talk to Red Bus about TAPE

There’s something faintly nerve-wracking about a play that promises no interval, no blackout, nowhere for an audience to catch its breath. TAPE, Stephen Belber‘s one-hour two-hander-turned-three-hander, arrives at the Lion & Unicorn this August courtesy of Cellar Door Theatre Company, with Jaimee Doyle directing Paul Kelvin, Nick Chinn and Brittany Rex as three old school friends whose reunion, ten years on, looks set to turn into something closer to an interrogation. Ahead of opening night, we caught up with the Cellar Door team to find out more.

Red Bus: TAPE is a very American play, originally set in a Michigan motel. What, if anything, did you find yourselves adapting or rethinking for a London audience, and what did you decide to leave exactly as Belber wrote it?

Cellar Door: Belber’s writing is so specific to early-2000s America that changing the dialogue would lose the play’s raw edge. Where we adapted was in the staging. Fringe theatre in London requires a certain resourcefulness, so our black box set design strips away the noise and focuses on key elements like the bed, which is really the emotional centrepiece of the show. By keeping the set minimal and tight, it actually makes the space feel much more claustrophobic.

Red Bus: The play runs in real time with no interval. What does that structure demand of you as a director, and of the cast, that a more conventional shape wouldn’t?

Cellar Door: A play like this demands full focus and presence on stage. There’s nowhere to hide. No lights or sound to keep the audience entertained, it’s all the actors. It’s a crazy hard thing to do, but I’m really lucky to have the best cast, and they’ve taken it on and are fabulously engaging. As a director it’s been a fun challenge, but there’s a lot more you have to consider that you normally wouldn’t. The set can’t change, you can’t leave to get a prop, so the stage has to be full with everything you need. It also brings new challenges around pacing. The script is fantastic at keeping you intrigued, but like normal conversations there are rises and falls and it all has to be natural and in the moment. Despite all this, it’s been such an easy working experience since the whole team is so collaborative and fantastic at throwing out ideas when we hit a speed bump. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Red Bus: You’ve described the Lion & Unicorn as somewhere the audience becomes trapped in the room with the characters. How have you used that intimacy in the staging itself?

Cellar Door: Because the Lion & Unicorn already has a tight thrust setup, we’ve really leaned into it to turn the audience into a voyeur. The show’s fast pace and intense dynamic means we are pulling them in and making them question what happened. You really can’t look away, you’re trapped in that motel room with us.

Red Bus: With three characters each convinced of their own version of the truth, how did you approach rehearsing a script where nobody is a reliable narrator?

Cellar Door: Because everybody is the reliable narrator in their own narrative. It doesn’t matter if they contradict each other or the “objective truth” of events, to each individual character, and thus each corresponding actor, their version of events is the facts. The truth is objective, and everyone else is a dirty liar.

TAPE runs at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre, 11–15 August 2026, 7pm, as part of Camden Fringe.

Tape is one of the Red Bus picks for the Camden Fringe, find out about the others :