Muddle | Up Next Festival 2026

Thursday 26th March

6:30pm

Part of a triple bill

Muddle is a politically charged, darkly comic play set inside a long-running children’s television programme. Mandy, once a child star herself, now clings to the show as both livelihood and lifeline, numbing unresolved trauma with alcohol and routine. Her puppet co-star, Muddle, begins to speak beyond the script—questioning, accusing, and unsettling the carefully managed world around them.

When Mel, a young production assistant and former fan, enters the studio, admiration quickly gives way to obsession. The familiar patterns of exploitation repeat themselves, revealing how trauma is absorbed, repackaged, and passed down through institutions that prize obedience over care.

As the show reaches its tenth anniversary, the truth breaches the studio walls. Using the language of children’s television, kindness, bullying, safety. Mandy dismantles the lie of innocence in real time.

Muddle is an uncompromising examination of power, complicity, and silence, told through a form designed to distract us from exactly those truths.