Mime without limits: Broken Box Mime Theatre brings Double Take back to Edinburgh

No screens. No elaborate effects. Just bodies, movement and imagination. Becky Baumwoll from Broken Box Mime Theatre reveals how Double Take creates entire worlds from the simplest theatrical ingredients.

At a time when so much entertainment relies on technology and spectacle, what is the appeal of creating theatre with little more than performers' bodies, a puppet and a blackboard?

All theatre employs technology—technology is the language we speak; lighting design is technology, as is the live or recorded music by Wet Hands that has accompanied us for so many years. Spectacle is the ability to shift from a romance while waiting for a bus to intergalactic space —and, before that, to join two characters during their most intimate moment of decision. Spectacle is a cube in the performance space serving twenty different functions.

An excess of technological resources and onstage "fireworks" sometimes serves to mask a lack of poetic substance. Going to the theatre to see real people performing live is an absolutely revolutionary act today—just as revolutionary as doing something that doesn't involve looking at a screen.

I believe what continues to drive us to create theatre using our bodies is the knowledge that action, gesture, and movement are intrinsically human elements—just as breathing is. They are the fundamental building blocks of theatre across various cultures, yet people sometimes assume their limits have been reached—that there is nothing left to discover within these core elements. Often, that belief stems from a limitation in the theatre-maker's own curiosity or a limit to their tolerance for frustration. Just when we think the encounter between theatre and the human body has yielded everything it has to offer, a breath of fresh air reaffirms that there is still so much to explore—if only we knew how to listen.

Many people still associate mime with traditional street performance. How does Broken Box Mime Theatre's approach seek to redefine what mime can be for modern audiences?

Though mime is an ancient art form, many contemporary audience members haven’t seen a show performed in this medium, or they associate mime only with the oft-lampooned image of a performer “stuck” in an invisible box. We often meet audience members who share that they are surprised at the complexity, emotional depth, and range they encounter in our show. They often say, “I didn’t know mime could do that!”

In our shows, we lead with our contemporary point of view as artists making theatre in New York City. Our pieces draw upon cinematic storytelling techniques such as jump-cuts, perspective shifts, and time lapses. Our characters come through as nuanced, real people, performed by actors who are grounded in naturalistic movement and trained in contemporary acting for stage and screen. This fusion of the ancient and the contemporary creates a timeless yet fresh experience in the theatre. Our themes explore the ideas we wrestle with in our lives and bring into the rehearsal room: technology, identity, climate change, politics and life cycles.

The show moves from something as small as a hungry snail to something as vast as the Big Bang. What connects these seemingly very different stories?

The joy of the show comes from experiencing the tiny and the vast side-by-side, and sometimes all at once. A “double take” is a second look, another glance, something that pulls you back. The show invites audiences to discover the universe that exists between two people and the multitudes that a single glance can contain. We see this magnitude in tiny things: a delicate gesture between parent and adult child, a strand of DNA, the hopeful preparation for date night. Because we’re mimes and we can do anything, we also get to zoom out and take a look at the vast: a meteor crashing to Earth, the galaxy swirling in a spiral.

In each of the eight stories that comprise Double Take, there is more than initially meets the eye. In some cases, this theme is straightforward: for example, we follow a shoe store employee into the vast and absurd maze beneath the storefront to retrieve the correct size; or we peek beneath the “mask” a politician wears in public for a glimpse of solitary honesty. In other pieces, the layering is more open to interpretation. For example, audience members frequently emerge from the show deep in discussion about the piece titled Please. Depending on each audience member’s lived experience, they imagine a different hope from the character silently whispering “please” to her reflection in the bathroom mirror. These rich post-show discussions allow the audience’s imagination to continue expanding long after they leave the theatre.

You describe the audience's imagination as the show's most powerful tool. How do you encourage viewers to become active participants in creating the world of the performance?

By creating invisible objects, environments, and silent dialogue, BKBX invites audiences to fill in the blanks with their own imagination, connotation, or memory. They are “the final playwright.” In an age of so much distance, whether that be caused by technology, ideology, or pandemic, our artists and audiences find that mime cuts to the heart of what we love about live performance: it is a living collaboration, one particularly suited for staging transformations of all kinds. We consider the close partnership we create with the audience a large responsibility and an honour; it is the central characteristic of our art form.

Physical comedy and puppetry are often associated with laughter, but the show also promises emotional surprises. How do you balance humour with deeper moments of reflection?

Before answering, I’d like to clarify that the type of puppetry we do doesn't involve objects, but rather our hands—what we call a "proxy" in our own terminology. This allows us to bring animals onto the stage that otherwise wouldn't fit, or even an entire galaxy—which wouldn't fit either.

Returning to your question: yes, physical theatre and puppetry are often equated with comedy, but that all changes when you play with the rhythm and melody of the movements, the chosen themes, and the direction of the content—asking ourselves, "What do we want to share with the audience?" A love story? An acknowledgement of life's finitude? The challenges—and the fun—of following a retail worker through the ups and downs of her job? Then comes the question that makes the difference: How do we want to share this, what do we want to say about a given topic, and what chord do we want to strike in the audience?

Once we know the story, the next step is determining where to place the focus and what we want to convey. The rest falls into place naturally, because the things that make the audience laugh or cry are likely the same things we experienced ourselves during the exploratory phase of rehearsals.

Mime, puppetry, and physical theatre offer vast possibilities and serve as excellent means of communication. It is up to us to decide how we use them to reach the audience in the most effective way.

Double Take has already travelled from Edinburgh to Adelaide and is now returning to the Fringe. What have audiences taught you about the show since its premiere, and how has it evolved?

While Double Take is performed by two actors, it encompasses the creative work of Broken Box Mime Theatre’s 20 company members and over 15 years of development. Some pieces in the show were first performed in NYC in 2011 and have been evolving ever since, while other elements debuted with Double Take’s first show at the Adelaide Fringe in 2025.

We find audiences to be extremely generous and engaged in this show. People love to stick around after the performance and tell us about their experience - which pieces made them cry, when they laughed the most and which stories they want to see again. Because this show is a collection of shorts, we consider the “setlist” and order with great care. As we developed the show first in Adelaide, and then Edinburgh, we listened both to what audiences said after the show and to how we perceived them responding during the performance. With this audience input and collaboration with our incredible producers at Dutch Kills, we adjusted the order of the show, swapped out pieces, and eventually found an arc that really sings.

When we debuted the first iteration of the show in Adelaide, we had several audience members tell us they loved the show so much they wanted to see it a second time, and they did! This feels like the greatest compliment, and we think it’s fun that it resonates with our show title, Double Take.

Double Take is at the Edinburgh Fringe at Underbelly Bristo Square, Dairy Room, 5 – 30 Aug 2026 (not 18),13:25 - 14:25.  Ticket information here:Double Take | Edinburgh Festival Fringe