Another Waugh Literary Debut

The Daily Mail in Richard Eden’s gossip column, reports the literary debut of another descendent of Evelyn Waugh:

…Panda La Terriere, his great-granddaughter, has become the talk of the Edinburgh Fringe festival with a play she’s written about someone addicted to the internet Still only 20, Panda is the daughter of film producer Peter La Terriere and author Daisy Waugh…A student at Bristol University, Panda says her play, Isle of Muck, set on a remote Scottish island, is a reflection on the influence of social media on young people. ‘It’s a comedy, it’s a love story, it’s whimsical and goofy,’ says Panda … ‘It’s set in a rehabilitation centre for internet addicts.’… [H]er grandfather, newspaper columnist Auberon Waugh, whose writing was a haven of political incorrectness, had an acute sense of the absurd. She tells me: ‘I’d like to think he’d be proud of me.’

Here’s a description of the play from the Edinburgh Fringe ticket site:

Basil abandons university to join his Uncle January, an ageing party boy, on the sparsely populated Isle of Muck. He finds that his uncle, motivated by an irrational distrust for technology and the financial pressure of his castle’s upkeep, has set up a rehabilitation centre for internet addicts. Together they succeed in running a dysfunctional place of refuge that awkwardly combines January’s decadence with Basil’s meagre understanding of – but colossal admiration for – new-age spiritualism. That is, until the arrival of Maisie: a confusing patient who inadvertently throws everything into disarray.

One wonders what is Basil’s surname? Reviewing the play in the University of Bristol’s student newspaper, Naomi Adedokun wrote:

Isle of Muck thrives in its weirdness; the dialogue is snappy and thoughtful, the characters are weirdly wonderful and the story meanders somewhere between. Filing into the **space, the audience are greeted by three actors already on-stage, not interacting but certainly not still. They wait, appearing bored and antsy, pacing the floor and looking around. We’re left to anticipate what they’re anticipating, and the tension grows until the scene starts….The play would massively benefit by being longer and fleshing out more characters. …Overall, it’s a very fun time. I don’t want to spoil anything about the dance sequence near the end of the play, but that alone is worth the price of admission. ..We’ve only just started to consider internet addiction a real thing, and it’s refreshing to see a piece tackle that. The rehab centre is isolated on a tiny Scottish island (the eponymous Muck) and run by a veritable madman. The characters are over-exaggerated and the humour is eccentric. Slowly but surely the reality of the play becomes the normalised reality of the audience. We learn to love these people and their craziness – possibly because we recognise a bit of ourselves in them.

Other reviews are available at edfringereview.com. (Thanks to David Lull for that link.) The play opened on 3 August, and remaining performances are scheduled for 1715pm on 11, 13-18 August at the venue Greenside, 1b Royal Terrace–Jade Studio. Tickets are available here,

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