"The world is still providing things to think about and write about."

Playwright and collaborative theatre-maker Chris Thorpe on writing through the pandemic

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world then you are a citizen of nowhere. Every part of me wants to believe that is a lie.” 

Chris Thorpe writes a lot about identity and belonging. His one-man play Status -- available to watch until March 22 as part of the Shedinburgh Fringe Festival -- was written in the months following the Brexit Referendum in 2016 and explores what it still means to travel smoothly through the world on a British passport.  

Or in Chris’s own case, two British passports. This, he explains as part of the performance, is legal but at the discretion of the passport official. And the point is, of course, that some lucky people like himself have two passports whilst others drown because they don’t have any. Or they do have one, but it’s the wrong sort. 

He’s also left-wing. 

“It would be useful sometimes in modern Germany,” says one of the characters in Status (a coyote, as it happens, but it would take too long to explain why), “if the average person was able to en…