Interview: Ugly Bucket on Stuffed

Some nights, according to Ugly Bucket, an audience laughs all the way through a clown tucking their guts back in. On others nobody laughs at all. The Liverpool company’s STUFFED, a clowning show built from food bank testimony, plays New Diorama Theatre from 13 to 24 October, and Red Bus Londinium asked them why it is worth saying it all again, how they choose which testimony goes in, and what they make of the silent nights.

Red Bus: The show opens with the line “Everything in this show has already been said.” What made you decide that saying it all again, with clowns, was the right way to do it?

Ugly Bucket: When we open the show saying ‘Everything in this show has already been said’ – we are feeling the frustration that what we are about to talk about isn’t new knowledge, and yet, the issue doesn’t only persist but continues to grow. Everything has been said so many times that food poverty in one of the richest countries in the world has become our new normal. Does that mean we should stop saying it? Absolutely not. We must keep saying it because spreading knowledge, human stories and educating each other is our greatest power, but when we bring clowns into the picture, perhaps we can shake an audience out of that new normal, reminding them of the absurdity and horror of the ongoing crisis.

Red Bus: You’ve worked with real testimony from food bank workers and the people who use them. How do you decide what goes into a clowning show and what stays untouched, and how do you check that the people who shared their stories feel they’ve been treated fairly?
Ugly Bucket: It’s very difficult to decide what stays and what is cut. We would often consider what is being said across all testimonies or what are the threads running through them. This helps us think about the overall journey we want our audience to go on, and what testimony best supports that. For clowning, the testimony that we often use is testimony that helps us build visual worlds and characters within them. Every bit of design from the show has come from a place of testimony. In terms of checking in, we invited partners like Feeding Liverpool to join us for rehearsals while we tested ideas out. They were brilliant at holding us accountable to the people we represent. Together we would always question, does this form help the audience empathise with this person’s testimony? Can we connect with them on a deeper level.

Red Bus: Ugly Bucket’s belief is that when people are laughing, they are listening. Was there a moment in making STUFFED when the laughter stopped, or didn’t land the way you expected, and what did you learn from it?

Ugly Bucket: We created a scene around the testimony ‘this is a sticking plaster for someone that’s been eviscerated’. A clown falls onto the stage – guts spilling out of their stomach. They insist to the audience that they are totally ‘fine’ as they tuck their guts back in, refusing help. Three politician-like clowns enter, and when they consider how to help the eviscerated clown, the solution they eventually come to is a plaster, that they stick to the guts before all kissing it better. Some nights, audiences laugh at this scene all the way through, for its slapstick, absurdity, and grotesqueness. Other nights, nobody laughs at all. The scene can become humiliating, uncomfortable, horrifying. I think that both audience experiences of this scene are valid and interesting. Both offer something to play with whether it’s audience laughter or the deafening silence, which makes the scene more uncomfortable. Sometimes some audience may laugh, others may be looking around like what on earth are we laughing at? This is horrible! Suddenly there’s not just a relationship between the audience and the clown, but within the audience themselves. I think we’ve learnt to be comfortable with people not laughing, which as clowns doesn’t come easy, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t an opportunity to play.

Red Bus: The Good Stuff means audiences share a free meal beforehand and meet local organisations afterwards. Did the show shape the event, or did the event reshape the show?

Ugly Bucket: When making STUFFED we thought about the wrap-around at the start of our show making process, so both were very much developed side by side. As the verbatim testimony shaped the show it also shaped the wrap around. ‘The thing about food is, it gives you time’ – inspired our free pre-show meal. Giving our audiences an hour back in their day to connect with others felt like a powerful thing. When talking with Food Banks we also learned about how important action on a local level is, and we thought about how quite often we feel totally overwhelmed by the size of the issue which is demonstrated in the inferno in STUFFED’s climax. We knew we had to bring all the emotion our audience have felt watching the show and then empower them on a local level, meeting organisations who are already doing ‘the good stuff’. There is also our post-show pamphlet which reads ‘open me in the morning’ and is full of resources, but we ask the audience to go home and rest before reading in the morning. If we can carry change into the next morning, where people can begin to build small habits, that can make a bigger impact than people trying to do everything in one night and ultimately burning out, but it also links closely with the final lyrics in STUFFED’s ending – ‘Our time is nearly over, and there’s work to be done, and we’ll go again tomorrow, but first go home and go to sleep, you must be dead on your feet, and I’ll see you in the morning for the good stuff’.

Red Bus: You’ve now taken STUFFED from Edinburgh to Liverpool, London and Leeds, with captioned, relaxed and Pay What You Can performances along the way. How has the response differed from one city to the next, and has anything an audience has said or done changed how you perform it?

Ugly Bucket: The response has been really interesting across different cities. In Liverpool, where we’re based, we’ve always found audiences really get behind the ferocity of the show; it feels like they’re rallying with us. Our anger is their anger. In Edinburgh, we also had fantastic audiences who got behind the work, but we noticed that some people felt the anger was directed at them, which left them asking ‘Why are you so angry?’, ‘Why is it so loud?’ or ‘Why are you saying the same thing over and over again?’ It was challenging to ask so much of audiences emotionally in Edinburgh when they are seeing show after show, and without the pre-show meal and post-show panel, we wondered whether some audiences had the space to digest the work in the way it needs to be experienced.

For the 2026 run, we’ve changed scenes and tweaked moments throughout the show based on feedback, and I think it feels more hopeful than ever as a result. We were also adamant to offer the full STUFFED experience for every performance. But it remains exciting to us as artists to make something that can be polarising. We’ve taken risks, we haven’t played it safe, and we’ve created something that can feel like a stark mirror to the society we’re living in. We don’t expect everyone to agree with it, or even enjoy the way we deliver it, but we do hope it makes people feel something. We are excited to see how it’s received in London and Leeds.

Booking details:

Venue: New Diorama Theatre, 15 to 16 Triton Street, Regent’s Place, London NW1 3BF
Dates: 13 to 24 October 2026

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