Arts
Maeve Marsden is a writer, producer and theatremaker, focusing on comedy, cabaret, live music and storytelling. Mother’s Ruin: A Cabaret about Gin, a theatrical cabaret Maeve wrote and performs in has sold out seasons at Sydney Festival, Perth Fringe World, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Adelaide Fringe, Festival of Voices (Tasmania), Melbourne Cabaret Festival, the Sydney Opera House, Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Underbelly Festival, London, as well as regional seasons in Australia and the UK. Mother’s Ruin was named one of Time Out’s Best 10 Shows on Sydney Stages 2017. Winner Best Cabaret, Sydney Fringe 2016, Lady Sings it Better, a feminist comedy cabaret act Maeve directs and performs in has been touring to critical acclaim for 8 years, with seasons at Sydney Comedy Festival, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Festival of Voices (Tasmania) and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, among others. Maeve also hosts and programs Queerstories, a storytelling event and podcast that features members of the LGBTQI community, has been running monthly at Giant Dwarf in Sydney since September 2016, with satellite events in Melbourne and Brisbane. Winner Best Spoken Word, Sydney Fringe 2016, Queerstories has sold out every month since its inception, and has welcomed Australian LGBTQI icons to its stage. As a child of same-sex parents, Maeve is passionate about the rights of diverse families, and she writes and speaks on the issue often. As a writer, her work has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, Junkee, ABC Online, SBS Online, ArtsHub, Daily Review, Archer Magazine and Audrey Journal. In 2018, she edited at the ABC’s Sydney Mardi Gras 40th Anniversary Magazine, and she is currently editing a book for Queerstories, due for release with Hachette Australia in 2018. Maeve likes gin, dancing, cheese and TV melodramas with good ethics and bad dialogue. In this episode: We chat about leaving the day job and moving into being a full-time artist. The importance of a long-term strategy and taking time to work on a show's development. We then delve deep into what it really takes to have a SOLD OUT season at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and what it took to achieve that.