The Edinburgh Fringe is almost upon us and to get prepared for another Scottish summer Read About Stuff is running a ‘Five From The Fringe’ interview series, where creative teams answer five questions about their upcoming Festival shows.
In this interview, I chat to One Table Two Chairs Charitable Foundation about their new show Dic Dic Chang Chang Playground.
Can you tell me a little about your show and what audiences can expect?
It’s a big, noisy, fun introduction to Cantonese opera for kids and their families. Two young heroes, Captain Dic Dic and Chang Chang, are guardians of Cantonese Opera Land, and they’ve got a problem: the Boring King, a puppet tyrant, is out to make everything dull.
With a bit of help from the Cantonese Opera Fairy, they have to fight back—and that’s where the audience comes in. We get the families learning gestures, picking up a few Cantonese phrases, shouting magic spells, basically signing up as secret agents to help beat the Boring King. So it’s not a sit-and-watch sort of show. There’s live music, there’s drama, there’s a fair amount of happy chaos. We made it for ages three and up, so even the little ones can join in.
What drew you to this specific story, and why does it belong at the Edinburgh Fringe?
A lot of people, when they hear “Cantonese opera,” picture something old and serious sitting behind glass in a museum. We wanted to do the opposite. The whole “defeat the Boring King” idea actually came out of that frustration, because the cure for boredom is performing—singing, moving, playing. So the kids end up fighting boredom by doing the art form themselves, which felt like exactly the right way in.
The Fringe just makes sense for that. It’s a festival where people turn up ready to try things they’ve never seen, and there are families everywhere looking for exactly that. We’ve had three years here now, and this is our last one, so there’s something nice about bringing it back one final time for audiences who are open to it.
What has been the biggest challenge in bringing this production to life?
Honestly, it’s the balancing act. Cantonese opera has these very precise gestures and traditions, and we didn’t want to throw all that out just to make something easy. But you’re also asking a three-year-old to follow along and have fun, so it can’t be precious or complicated either. Getting it to a place where it’s properly fun and still real—where we’re actually teaching the craft, not just dressing up the story—took a lot of trial and error. The other tricky bit is the audience participation. Every show is a little different depending on the energy in the room, so you have to keep things tight but stay loose enough to roll with whatever the kids throw at you.
How does the design of your show (set, sound, or lighting) impact the presentation of your story?
For us, the design is really about getting out of the actors’ way. We keep the set deliberately minimal because we don’t want anything competing for attention—no big scenery, no clutter, just the performers.
That comes straight from our company name, One Table Two Chairs, and the whole Cantonese opera philosophy behind it: the performer is the show. A single gesture can become a mountain, a journey, an entire battle. So we strip everything back and let the actors carry it—their movement, their expressions, the precision in every gesture, the singing. That’s where the real magic of this art form lives, and with children especially, a bare stage means their eyes go straight to the performers. They start noticing the tiny details of how an actor moves, and that’s exactly what we want them to fall for.
Sound and lighting are there to support that, not steal from it. The percussion—the Muyu and the Gong—runs right through the show (it’s even where our heroes’ names, Dic Dic and Chang Chang, come from), and the lighting helps carry the audience through the story.
But all of it serves the performers. At the end of the day, this is a show about what a trained actor can conjure out of thin air, with nothing but skill and imagination.
If you could sum up the show in one word or phrase, what would it be and why?
“A playground.” It’s in the name for a reason. A playground is where kids run around, make noise, get things wrong, try again—no pressure, just play. That’s how we want families to feel about an art form that’s been around for centuries: not something to be careful around, but something they can climb all over and make their own. If they walk out feeling like Cantonese opera belongs to them too, we’ve done our job.
Dic Dic Chang Chang Playground runs at Theatre 3 at theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) from August 7th – 15th. Tickets can be purchased here: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/always-sometimes-maybe
