Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#161): Inge-Vera Lipsius, FACILITY 111: A GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT
As anticipation builds for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, we’re catching up with a range of exciting creatives preparing to bring their work to the world’s largest arts festival this August. In this series, we delve into the stories behind the shows, the inspiration driving the artists, and what audiences can expect. Today, we’re joined by Inge-Vera Lipsius to find out more about her show, Facility 111: A Government Experiment.
01. Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it?
Facility 111: A Government Experiment is a surreal new audio piece/play that I have written, directed, and am performing live; it takes place in a completely dark theatre. It is a piece that places the audience at its heart, as it continuously addresses them—‘you’—and asks them to imagine themselves in a series of images, a series of scenes, that unfold in two interconnected cities: one made of glass, one made of sand.
It is my Edinburgh Fringe debut and is an idea I came up with some years ago. It is inspired by real events, which I have decided not to disclose in the play’s blurb or in the play itself, in order to keep the focus on the audience and what they choose to visualise. The idea came from my desire to explore themes like migration and empathy—using the play to create parallels between different lives, locations, and experiences—through the form of an ‘imagination play’ that is constructed in and by the audience’s minds.
02. What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?
In the past, I have staged sold-out performances in London and Amsterdam of my play Quad Loop (that I wrote on the Kamila Valieva doping scandal at the 2022 Winter Olympics) and Paranoia (my adaptation of the classic Dutch novella of the same name by Willem Frederik Hermans), but these have bigger casts and a more complex set-up. Because Facility 111 is (hopefully) very evocative for the audience and, at the same time, relatively minimalistic, it seemed like a logical step to premiere it at the Fringe; it is also my most experimental piece to date and has proven to be a great conversation starter for audiences!
03. How would you describe your show in three words?
Surreal, unsettling, thought-stirring…
04. What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?
I hope that they learn something new about themselves, each other, and the world around them, through the images that the play calls up for them or that they choose to visualise.
05. What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?
The Fringe is just a joy for me—pure pleasure! No survival tip, just a reminder to enjoy! I enjoyed myself so much when I was in Edinburgh as a performer the previous times (when I was studying at Cambridge)! After university, I studied at Ecole Philippe Gaulier in France, and the most important thing Philippe taught us was about pleasure on stage and in the theatre, so that is really the most important thing to always remember and preserve…
06. Where and when can people see your show?
At Assembly Front Room (54 George Street) from 31 July – 17 Aug (except 12 Aug) at 11:25 am! Tickets: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/1132-facility-111-a-government-experiment
