Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#147): Jack Godfrey, HOT MESS

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 Jack Godfrey to find out more about Hot Mess: The Musical.

1. Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it? 
Hot Mess is a new musical which reimagines the climate crisis as a rom-com between Earth and Humanity. We follow E and Hu as they meet, fall in love and then gradually fall out of love as the relationship starts to fall apart. My co-writer, Ellie Coote, and I have wanted to write a show about the climate crisis for ages. We did lots of scheming about how to make something which is fundamentally fun and silly, while still talking about this huge important issue which is increasingly relevant to us all. The concept was initially inspired by a song that I wrote after going through a particularly tragic break-up. I realised that I could change the lyrics so that the song was instead about a ‘break-up’ between Earth and Humanity, which I thought was an exciting idea for a show.

2. What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?
It’s long been a dream of mine to bring a show to the Edinburgh Fringe, ever since I performed there as a student with my university a cappella group. I’ve been several times as an audience member, and it always feels like such a hive of creativity and artistic brilliance. It’s the perfect place to share something brand-new because there is such an appetite for fresh and original work. And as a writer, it’s an excitingly unique opportunity to put our show in front of an audience of a huge variety of ages, backgrounds, and tastes. I can’t wait to see how people respond!

3. How would you describe your show in three words?
Hot, Messy, Ploughs

4. What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?
Aside from being blown away by the performances of the brilliant Danielle Steers and Tobias Turley (who I can’t quite believe I get to work with), I hope that audiences come away from Hot Mess enjoying the silly jokes about gas and ploughs, humming the songs and hopefully thinking about our relationship with our planet in a way that they hadn’t done previously.

5. What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?
Locate the top-tier toilets. And I’m not going to tell you where they are. You have to earn that knowledge yourself.

6. Where and when can people see your show?
Our show is running at 3:10 throughout the Fringe at Pleasance Two in the Pleasance Courtyard!