Claire Dowie is an award-winning writer and performer with a reputation for work that defies categorisation. Originally trained as a dancer, she started writing poetry (published by Faber and Apples and Snakes) and quickly gained a reputation as an outspoken and hilarious stand up comic on the cabaret circuit in the early eighties. She felt limited by the need for punchlines and started writing plays, inventing her own genre: stand up theatre.

I don't understand it. I've still got muscles, tendons, sinews, whatnots - nothing's changed skeleton wise, body wise. It's still all intact.
Yet it doesn't work. It won't move itself.
Leaping barriers of age, sexuality and gender, Gloria prepares to dance the Can Can one last time.
Written and performed by the pioneering Claire Dowie, When I Fall If I Fall tells Gloria's story, a story about growing up feeling different and not fitting in...
With this new work, Dowie continues her ground-breaking subversion of gender expectations and stereotypes.
This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in August 2019.