PHILLIPS-HORST: So what Fringe number is this for you?

KIMMINGS: Six.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Last year was my first, and it was very overwhelming.

KIMMINGS: What did you do?

PHILLIPS-HORST: I did the show I’m doing now, but a much less ambitious version. Much smaller. It was at C venues, which I didn’t know anything about — I came here sight unseen. And I was also moving here, because my boyfriend was getting his master’s at the Botanic Garden, so we moved from New York, and I thought, I’ll do a Fringe show, because I’ve always wanted to.

KIMMINGS: What’s it called?

PHILLIPS-HORST: The Last Mad Man.

KIMMINGS: Oh yeah, I know this. So you’re doing it again.

PHILLIPS-HORST: I spent all year working on it. I met this dramaturg in London who’s now directing the show, and we’ve been developing it, and now it’s at Assembly and it’s a bigger show. There’s more to it.

KIMMINGS: It’s quite good to do that with the same show. Up its game.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Is this your first Fringe with Bog Witch?

KIMMINGS: Yeah. I wouldn’t do the Fringe twice personally, but that’s just because I wouldn’t be able to fucking afford it.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Well, I’m glad I live here, because it’s way cheaper.

KIMMINGS: Although you could have rented your flat out. Six grand.

PHILLIPS-HORST: I don’t believe in that.

KIMMINGS: It’s insanity. One month. And it’s not even nice, my flat. It’s gross. It looked nice in the pictures and then it was like, oh.

PHILLIPS-HORST: That’s obscene. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about my show. The concept is there’s one man left on Earth, and he’s an advertising copywriter. He’s kind of going crazy, he’s all alone, and he’s trying to rebrand the apocalypse, because it’s the one thing he knows how to do. But the world it’s set in is one where ecological collapse has caused the end of human civilisation. So throughout the show he’s going back through all this work he’s done, having these flashbacks to projects that destroyed the planet, and he starts to connect the dots that maybe it was the excessive consumption—

KIMMINGS: It was all his fault.

PHILLIPS-HORST: I won’t put too fine a point on it. You have to come see the show. But yes, it raises questions of identity and consumption.

KIMMINGS: Is there anyone else on the planet at all?

PHILLIPS-HORST: He is the last person. It’s sad.

KIMMINGS: I would just murder myself. Which is called suicide.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Yes. And your show is also about climate.

KIMMINGS: Ecology. More about ecological collapse. More about nature than about the climate crisis. Climate crisis being the holder — what they say about everything. It’s a true story about me going to the country and trying to set up an eco farm.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Which you’ve done.

KIMMINGS: Sort of. Me and my partner. He’s much more ambitious about the farm side of it. I couldn’t give a shit about it.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Do you like the political aspect of it more than the actual farming?

KIMMINGS: I would never touch a hoe. Do you know what I mean? I just couldn’t. I’m so ADHD. It would literally be like, oh, this is fun — and then. I couldn’t produce crops. Sometimes he asks me to water his garden when he’s away, and two days in I’m like, no.

PHILLIPS-HORST: My boyfriend — my fiancé, actually — is a botanist. And we have a garden now in Edinburgh, which, coming from New York where you don’t have any green space at all, I do feel like I’ve moved to the rural countryside.

KIMMINGS: It is very green here.

PHILLIPS-HORST: And I do feel a little bit like this Marie Antoinette fantasy, where I’m like, I live in the garden. I don’t know how to do anything with it, but the plants are so pretty. But it’s been a big adjustment from New York.

KIMMINGS: The Fringe feels like it’s as much stimulation.

PHILLIPS-HORST: This feels like summer camp for theatre and comedy. It’s really fun, obviously. But New York has this very specific urbane thing it’s giving you all the time. It’s magazines and galleries and openings and martinis, and it’s kind of—

KIMMINGS: Homeless people shouting.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Exactly. And that’s what I tell myself whenever I start to miss the martinis. I think, remember, there aren’t little rats running across my feet as I walk into my house.

KIMMINGS: So what’s this article about?

PHILLIPS-HORST: This is about—

KIMMINGS: Two losers.

PHILLIPS-HORST: This is about two fascinating, cantankerous intellectuals whose life experiences are brushing up against things like the collapse of the earth. And how do you make art about that? How do you make ecological work that laughs at itself? That’s one of the questions facing me as an artist when I look around.

KIMMINGS: Yeah. How do I take this and turn it into something? My first instinct when I wanted to make a show about the climate crisis, about ecological issues, was that I had to be really funny. It’s definitely sad at the end — there’s definitely a process of grief in it — but it can’t be screaming at you. It can’t be lecturing you, and it can’t make you feel too sad, because all of us are feeling that all the time. So my ideal would be that people leave going, I haven’t really spoken to you about how you feel about the climate crisis. How do you feel? And the other one goes, I’m terrified. Just having a conversation — because I think we all keep our emotions about it quite inside, because we feel so guilty.

PHILLIPS-HORST: I think that’s a hundred percent what I would say too, if I had a moral core. That’s what I want. I want people to have these conversations somewhere in there.

KIMMINGS: And it has a personal, universal bent to it, so you can’t not write about yourself.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Of course. And I feel the same way. This is how I see the world. It’s a total distillation of all the things I see as the problems and the potential solutions, and what’s beautiful and what’s ugly about the world. You’re not saying everything explicitly — I think this is ugly, I think this is beautiful — but of course it’s in there. Obviously my main goal is people laughing the entire time. But then they leave, and they’re asking questions about consumption. Asking questions about capital. About identity. Because there is this interesting question about the things we love, right? The matcha. Having that dopamine rush of being loved by a crowd, and by this urbane, consumptive environment.

KIMMINGS: When I first made the show I was like, it will tour nowhere. It will just happen in one place, and I’ll do it once, and it’ll be a one-off. Now, of course, it’s a machine churning and spewing its carbon all over everything.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Like Al Gore taking planes everywhere to give his little presentation.

KIMMINGS: But I work for an organisation called Climate Spring, who are more television — I’m not very television — and they always say that culture is upstream of politics. We have to put it in every show we make. It can’t just be shows about the climate. It’s got to be in the background of all shows. If we’re writing something about the present, it has to be in there, because we are living through it. And the more it’s put into a show, the more we’re talking about it, the more people feel comfortable talking about it.

PHILLIPS-HORST: And the character in your show. Is it you, but not?

KIMMINGS: It’s me, but it’s not. This one more than any of them. Normally I’m turning to the audience as myself, and then, because it’s always autobiographical, I might go into the past and perform as an actor.

PHILLIPS-HORST: You’re giving them commentary, letting them know there’s character-me and then there’s real-me. You’re breaking—

KIMMINGS: Normally. But this time I’m not. This is the first time I’ve actually done it that way, because there’s a narrator, and the narrator’s me. And that was because I was like, I don’t know how to fucking learn all the lines to tell you what’s going on and all the lines in the scenes. But I kind of like it more. In the beginning I’m such an idiot. I’m so dopey. I don’t know how to do anything, and I’m really enjoying playing that character. Because I was like that. But I wasn’t that bad.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Right, so you get to ham it up and not have to apologise for it.

KIMMINGS: But you’re not playing yourself.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Well, the character’s name is Steven, which is my real name. But it’s sci-fi, so it’s not—

KIMMINGS: So it is about you.

PHILLIPS-HORST: It is quite inspired by my real life experiences.

KIMMINGS: Far from the end of the world.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Far from the end of the world. Although — it’s crazy. As we’re doing the show, there are literally wildfires destroying France, destroying Spain. And right here. I went down to London for a week, I came back, and all of the Salisbury Crags—

KIMMINGS: But was that a wildfire, or was it someone dropping a cigarette?

PHILLIPS-HORST: It may have been a cigarette. But of course the problem is that it’s drier and hotter than it has ever been. So that cigarette might not have caught a couple of years ago, and now it does.

KIMMINGS: Buy more Coca-Cola.

PHILLIPS-HORST: Exactly. Buy more oil. But there are ways, as individuals, that you can live a more intentional, conscious life that’s less wasteful. Obviously the main solutions have to be policy solutions on a global level. But I do think if culture can do that—

KIMMINGS: And everyone wants to watch that culture, then the people in policy, in politics, in corporations, don’t have any choice but to follow what the public wants.

PHILLIPS-HORST: You’re right, but it’s crazy to me. Even the most left-wing party in Scotland, the Scottish Greens, propose a ban on new drilling. They’re not even saying we need to stop using oil now. The Green Party should be like, we’re done with oil.

KIMMINGS: They just want to get voted in. I wrote a TV programme called The Rapture that’s on BBC at the moment. It’s a drama, based on a book, fifteen years old — I had to update all of the stuff in it. A girl claims to be able to see the future, and in the future there’s a massive climate catastrophe. It was so insane to write, because every two weeks I had to change something. Rosebank, the oil drilling that’s happening up here, just got approved again — and in the conspiracy that’s threaded into the show, it’s a question of whether that’s going to be allowed or not. We were talking about, what would be a crazy temperature for it to be?

PHILLIPS-HORST: Oh my god. And it’s literally that temperature now. It’s forty degrees in London.

KIMMINGS: We were saying, that will never happen. And it happens literally at the same time as the programme.

KIMMINGS: It’s 12:50, yours?

PHILLIPS-HORST: 12:50. Assembly Roxy.

KIMMINGS: That was my first venue. It wasn’t called that then. It was Zoo Roxy.

PHILLIPS-HORST: And what time is yours?

KIMMINGS: Mine’s on a rolling time. It goes eleven, three, seven.

KIMMINGS: Shall we do a swap?

PHILLIPS-HORST: We should absolutely do a swap. I won’t be able to come to the eleven.

KIMMINGS: No, of course not. But you can come to a six.

PHILLIPS-HORST: I’d love to come to a six.

Bryony Kimmings: Bog Witch is at the Traverse, Theatre 1, until 30 August. The Last Mad Man is at Assembly Roxy: Downstairs, 12:50pm, until 30 August.