LOUISE ORWIN’S FAMEHUNGRY, THE SMASH HIT MULTI AWARD-WINNING SHOW.

AFTER A MULTI-AWARD WINNING EDINBURGH RUN, A WILD 3 WEEK RUN IN NEW YORK, aND TOURING THROUGH DENMARK (TWICE!), MALTA, ALL OVER THE THE UK, AND MEXICO’S PRESTIGIOUS CERVANTINO FESTIVAL, FAMEHUNGRY WILL BE TOURING INTERNATIONALLY THROUGH 2026 aND 2027.

Louise Orwin has read the writing on the wall.

Performance art is dead. (Maybe)

Born from an existential crisis in Louise’s mid-thirties - watching the arts industry crumble around her and wondering what the hell we are doing here - FAMEHUNGRY began when she met a 15yr old TikToker with 50,000 followers, performing daily to audiences bigger than she’d ever dreamt of. Mid-existential reckoning, she proposed an experiment: she asked them to mentor her.  What followed is a chaotic, funny and deeply unsettling descent into the attention economy-  and a battle cry for the future of performance art.

Taking place simultaneously in a theatre and on TikTok Live, every night the show goes live and Louise makes a deal with the internet: if you get me to 20,000 likes, I’ll do something amazing for you.  The stage becomes an endurance arena - a fast, messy, loud, and totally unpredictable hour-long collision between a live theatre audience, a live TikTok audience and the Almighty Algorithm itself. Louise performs a constantly escalating series of tasks inspired by TikTok trends, in order to win over an invisible mass audience who may love her, troll her, fetishise her, or attempt to destroy her. All watched on by a live theatre audience.

The show has been watched by anywhere between 300 and 5000 unsuspecting strangers on TikTok on any given night. Louise has been trolled by neo-nazis, egged on by schoolgirls, and tipped by strangers who enjoy the show. To date, across 100+ shows, she has earned £21.49.

She has also been suspended from her own TikTok account mid-show countless times for “adult sexual content” [of which there is none].

To navigate this brave new world, Orwin enlists Gen Z TikToker Jaxon Valentine to guide her through dance trends, enforced face filters and endless monetisable content. All with the aim of asking a very personal question: how can performance art survive the digital age?

Blending live art, serious artistic enquiry, social experiment and digital chaos, FAMEHUNGRY is theatre pushed to its limits. It asks how social media is reshaping our sense of identity, labour, value and visibility, what this means for artists working outside of the mainstream, and how we deal with the sneaking suspicion that social media is distracting us from the apocalypse.

List x Sit Up Award Winner 2024 + Summerhall Lustrum Award Winner 2024 + The Space Digital Award 2023

Shortlisted for Arts Council England’s Digital Innovation Content Award 2024

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY

“a portrait of humanity as it desperately tries to wring love and affirmation from the machine” ★★★★ - The Scotsman

“A vital presence… and skilful interrogation of how to make art in a world that feels like it’s being chewed up, swallowed and regurgitated as contextless slop” ★★★★ - Three Weeks

“Funny, inventive and stunningly incisive… it’s meaty, knotty innards leave you reeling” - The Independent

★★★★★ - The Indiependent

★★★★ - Adventures in Theatreland

★★★★ - Wales Online

READ THE NEW YORK TIMES FEATURE ON THE SHOW HERE

Please get in touch with producer@louiseorwin.com to enquire about becoming a tour partner. Tour Pack and Media Kit available on request.

CREATIVE TEAM

Written, conceived and performed: Louise Orwin

Collaborator/performer/TikTok Star: Jaxon Valentine

Additional TikTok cameos: Arthur Jones, Emily Haldane, Ella Simms

Movement Director: Jenni Jackson

Dramaturgical Support: Rachel Mars & Chris Campbell

Set Design Consultation: Emma Bailey

FAMEHUNGRY was made with support by Arts Council England, The Space, Colchester Arts Centre, The Place, Pleasance, Battersea Arts Centre and Dr. Amy Orben, University of Cambridge.