an interview with three pound coin

[image description: the three pound coin team are stood by a turquoise fountain in Edinburgh, wearing colourful clothing. Edinburgh castle stands behind them.]

Three Pound Coin is an independent theatre company, formed by a collective of queer creatives living in Edinburgh. After experiencing a lack of theatre companies with a focus on queer stories, we decided to create Three Pound Coin. It was founded to showcase queer art, create an open space and to encourage young writers to engender what it is to be young and queer in Edinburgh. We are working to bridge the gap between student life and professional life for queer creatives living in Edinburgh, to provide open and experimental spaces free from taboo, and to showcase art that is unapologetically queer.

Mxogyny content editor Debbie Shamir chats to co-founder and artistic director, Ben Fleming and co-founder and co-executive producer, Doug Stephenson about their new theatre company, Three Pound Coin, and their motivations for creating this new platform.

Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your theatre company, Three Pound Coin. 

Ben: Three Pound Coin is a brand-new theatre company set up by the queer community of Edinburgh, for the queer community in Edinburgh. It was born out of projects we had been working on over lockdown. Emily, another co-founder, and I were having conversations about The Boys in the Band – a play about gay men in the 1960’s in New York – and unpacking the queerness of the play, and once it became clear to us that a lot of theatre wasn’t going to be able to happen on stage in September, we were quite devastated.  

We had really enjoyed working on a piece of queer theatre and wanted to continue doing this in whatever way we could, so we decided to set up a theatre company that was explicitly queer; telling queer stories, with a queer form, told by queer people. We all feel that there has been a true lack of queer representation in the mainstream of British theatre, and Edinburgh theatre more specifically. Queer stories come and go, but there’s never really a consistent queer presence within the theatre scene – and that’s something we are looking to change. We wanted to harbour a consistent queer community of creatives.  

Doug: I totally agree! We brought this together because we wanted to work with the community that was already here. Edinburgh is a beautifully queer city with so many amazing community leaders and political movements going on and some really amazing thinkers. From the beginning we wanted to reach out to Edinburgh and Scotland-based queer charities like LGBT Scotland, and from speaking to them we’ve been brought into contact with other queer communities. There’s a sense of galvanisation within the queer community at the moment; there are so many origin stories, projects and movements going on, and being able to connect to each one has been so beautiful. We want to be a part of it, and help spread each other’s message, and that’s really what Three Pound Coin is about. It’s not just putting on art, it’s about telling stories – it’s about facilitating people’s dreams.  

Can you tell us about the fundraiser you’ve organised on the 19th February?  

Doug: We really wanted to start off with a big bang. Our love is art, theatre, writing, directing and producing, and I think a lot of us were so disillusioned by lack of support for the arts from the government and other funding bodies during COVID-19. So, we brought ourselves together and decided that we wanted to create something that was COVID-19 safe, but also that didn’t detract from the quality or magic of theatre and what is it to create and produce art, just in a different form. We decided to put on a 24-hour broadcast, made up of three radio plays, interviews with community leaders, curated playlists, games and a prize draw. 

Ben knew MOJO, our collaborators for this project, who are doing the radio side. We had the arts side down, but we also wanted to look at how we could access the community and show that we’re taking up space in Edinburgh, so we contacted a bunch of charities. The first was the Respect Me campaign, which is an amazing charity working for anti-bullying awareness. We then contacted LGBT Youth Scotland and LGBT Health and Wellbeing. Those two charities specifically have helped us so much with our growth as queer people, and specifically me with non-binary identity. They have helped us in understanding our stories, our history and validating who we are. So, I really wanted to help promote that and give back. We wanted to start with a fundraiser that wasn’t just for us, but that would also give back to those really amazing charities, and everything came together. We started sending out emails and found so many people with incredible stories and we eventually bought everything together to create Three Pound Coin.  

Ben: Just to add, it feels as though the 24-hour broadcast fundraiser is very of the moment. Logistically we were thinking ‘what can we do at this moment, within the circumstances of COVID-19 and social distancing? What is the best project we can possibly do, not a dialled down version of a stage production? Let’s not just film it, let’s do something that’s a project in its own right’, and I’m hoping that we’ve achieved that through the interviews, and the music and the plays.  

It’s different areas of the arts community coming together in a difficult time. MOJO is very music focused, and then us, the theatre lot, all very different, coming together to collaborate –and that unity within the arts world is very of the moment. Now is the time for queer art. Queer art has always been there, there has been a constant hum in the background, but now is the time to get that into the mainstream and taking up space, and it’s not just us that are doing that. I feel as though we are fortunate enough, as queer creatives, to be living in a time which is an almost renaissance of queer art. This is a really special moment, that I am really grateful to be a queer creative living through a time where we have the liberty to shout about these things.  

Doug: Yeah, I also think the voice of the young queer creative is really important and we really want to get that out there.  

Tickets for the fundraiser, ‘Mojo Flips the Coin’, are available here for £1. 

How have your experiences as queer creatives informed your decision to create Three Pound Coin? 

Doug: Something that I’ve not really seen in Edinburgh is not just queer representation, but queer POC representation. I haven’t seen a community of black, brown creatives who can talk about their queer stories, because Edinburgh is quite a white population. What I really wanted to do was not just bring my own queer experience to it, but also find a way to reach out to people and get stories out there in any way possible. I wanted to make us a platform that’s open not just to queer stories but which is also intersectional – any story that wants to be told that isn’t always going to be what you expect.  

We want to tell the unconventional stories, the stories that aren’t told; there are no taboos with us, we just want to support you and get your voice heard. My experience has been with producing mainly, but I was also a young carer back in the day and that’s another thing I want to bring to Three Pound Coin. I want to create a healthy, kind environment and space for people to be working in. You don’t need to come from an educated or rich background, you can come from a working class and carer background like me and have support, and have no judgment. We want to support you and be a platform for you, and it’s something I haven’t really seen in Edinburgh – that level of outreach for the untold stories, the unconventional stories, the ones people never really think about. Bringing a different perspective is exactly what I wanted to see. Also, being a biomedical scientist and doing everything to avoid doing my degree has been really fun too!  

Ben: Very much echo the trying to avoid doing your degree as much as possible, I think that’s probably a common thread amongst the company! For me, I’ve always found that the stories I love the most and the ones that move me the most are queer stories, or at least have queer protagonists in – and so, in a very shallow way, that’s just what I enjoy and what I want to do. As a creative there are deeper levels to it but fundamentally it’s just that this is the kind of art I like and want to put out. It’s what I like talking about.  

If you scratch below that, the reason I like talking about that and the reason I relate to that most is because growing up I didn’t have as much of that input. Personally, I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching with my sexuality, had a lot of confusion about being a bisexual person and not being able to place myself in either camp. It’s a difficult thing to do, and I didn’t have many queer friends growing up and not many queer influences, and so if I had more films, plays and TV’s shows that had told me the complex and different stories that were beyond the gay best friend or gay uncle archetype, something that is a bit deeper than that, then perhaps it wouldn’t have been as confusing for me and I would have had a more colourful display of examples to see myself in. Those two reasons, I suppose one shallow and one a little more profound, are why I want to do queer theatre.  

What are you hoping will come from Three Pound Coin? 

Doug: What I really want as an end result is a community. I want to embolden, empower and strengthen the community that already exists. We want to be a platform for people that want to create art in whatever way. If you haven’t felt supported to be your queer self in a company before, just drop us a message or an email, we will find a place, a project or anything to help. That, for me, would be my ideal goal. Of course, I’d love to go to festivals and bring loads of amazing art to different places, but for me the route of this project is to create a wee family, a wonderful community that can be there, that can send each other links to memes, but also links to jobs, and really good opportunities in the future. I’d love to be able to start hiring people to create art, and create an economy within our own company because if you can be paid to do what you love, that’s the dream.  

Ben: I totally agree with that! We’re already seeing it start to happen with a couple of shows, having a cast of acts that we can do a zoom social or a Netflix party with – having that sense of queer community is fantastic. Also for me, perhaps I am being ambitious, but I’m really optimistic about the artistic influence that Three Pound Coin can have, on the Edinburgh creative scene but also eventually hopefully beyond that.  

I don’t want to create the same queer theatre that is self-marginalising. As I said before, queer art has always been there, drag artists have always been there and they’re fantastic – however I want to create queer theatre that fills the mainstream, and by that I don’t mean making queer theatre palatable, or toning it down so that straight people can understand it. What I mean is moulding the mainstream of theatre and art in our own image; saying that, for so long a main group of people have defined the mainstream, it’s about time someone else got to have their say as well. That’s really what I want to do with Three Pound Coin.  

Doug: You’ll see us on the cover of Time magazine in a year or so – just putting that out there now!  

What advice would you give to aspiring creatives who might find the general field inaccessible? 

Ben: Talk to us, is the one thing I’d say to local Edinburgh queers. We want to create this really warm welcoming community, so if you are a queer creative in Edinburgh and you’re reading this right now, please get in contact with us. Our email is open, our inbox is open.  I know we are still a small company and we’re growing, but we always want people involved in our community, we want to uplift voices, particularly those that are marginalised.  

Doug: I think it’s going to be difficult to find a platform for you to put on what you want to do and it’s only now that we’ve started Three Pound Coin that I’ve been able to create art that really emboldens me, art that I feel passionate about. It’s okay to be patient, and wait for that, and garner your skills on projects that are really fun and still engaging but may not exactly be what your soul is searching for – and that’s okay because that time will come.  

Something I’ve learnt particularly recently from this project, is that the charities are so here as well. Any queer creative who wants advice, or connections to other groups, just get in contact with LGBT Youth Scotland, or LGBT Health & Wellbeing. These people are so helpful and full of advice and support. There is an established group of people here to help, and the same goes for us: we are here to help. Another thing is the Young Scots Fund – for any queer creative looking for funding up to £1000. It’s a great way to get you on your feet, and get some equipment together. It’s okay to be patient, and work in the background and grow your skills, and the time will come and you’ll be great, so make use of the community we have around here, and the support you have. Be bold and get your name out there, there will be people who support you and who want to help you.  

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Ben is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Three Pound Coin. Since moving from Manchester to Edinburgh in 2018, Ben has been involved in a diverse range of productions with Bedlam Theatre and Big Mind Theatre in both direction and performance. Through working alongside other queer creatives at Three Pound Coin, he hopes to explore the breadth of queer experience, projecting new stories onto the stage that are compelling, shocking and sexy. Previously, Ben has looked at masculine expression when directing a production of Luke Norris’ ‘So Here We Are’, examining how patriarchal, small-town mindsets can harm sexual expression and identity. Outside of theatre Ben is reading History & Politics and has a background in political activism, as a founding member and former COO of Youth Politics UK.

Doug is Co-Executive Producer and Co-Founder of Three Pound Coin. Doug is a British/Filipino theatre maker focusing on the impact, outreach and community that our unapologetically queer theatre can make. Having come from a low income and rural background as a young carer, it has been a long journey for Doug to find their footing within the queer community. Discovering how their love of art, theatre and science can create a free, supportive and experimental space is one of the most wonderful projects they have undertaken. With experience in theatre finance, administration and Biomedical Sciences, Doug will bring their unique perspective to Edinburgh theatre and use the company to help uplift marginalised voices.

You can find Three Pound Coin on their website, instagram, and facebook, and donate to their crowdfunder.