Edinburgh Festival Fringe Q&A series – The Burns Project

As a source-based theatre maker who creates and performs work based on interviews and primary source research, I've made project over the last decade about everything from the Russian Revolution to colonisation in Puerto Rico to Nazi film directors – so a pretty wide range. I am a lifelong lover of Burns' work, and grew up around his poetry and music, so some kind of project was always in the back of my mind.

I split my time between New York and Scotland, and every January, I host a pretty rowdy Burns supper at my flat in Brooklyn with a ragtag of pals from all over the world (Americans, Puerto Ricans, French, Spanish), where everyone attempts a Scottish accent. So I knew a lot of his work. When I read the National Trust for Scotland had digitised his archive, I felt like it was an ideal opportunity to dive deeper into the man behind the poetry – and the more I discovered, the more sure I became that now was the moment to make this project.