Famehungry

Louise Orwin brings FAMEHUNGRY back to HOME on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 November, two nights in Manchester as part of a second UK and international tour. The show is a theatrical dive into the TikTok universe and the attention economy, and it's built around a real-life experiment Orwin ran when she cosplayed as a TikToker to see if she could hunt down fame and fortune for herself.

That experiment started from a mid-thirties existential crisis when Orwin met a 15-year-old TikToker whose audience completely dwarfed her own, and who offered to mentor her. From there, the show asks what it actually means to be an artist now. It runs on two tracks at once: the performance happens in the theatre and on TikTok Live simultaneously, so the room you're sitting in is only half the story. Each night, Orwin makes a deal with the internet: if her livestream hits 20,000 likes, she does something extraordinary, turning the stage into an endurance arena as she takes on an escalating series of tasks to win over an invisible online audience.

She's not on her own for it, either. The line-up includes the TikTok creator The Almighty Algorithm and a host of TikTok-Famous Faces, so the whole thing is populated by the very world it's looking at. The show picked up The List's Sit-Up Award for Best Production with a Social Impact and Summerhall's Lustrum Award at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and critics have described it as light and amusing yet sinister and dystopian, and urgent, powerful and frightening theatre. It's returning to HOME by popular demand, and since it's part of a tour, these are the only two nights it'll be in the city.

Both performances start at 7:00pm on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 November at HOME, with the show running across the theatre and TikTok Live at the same time.