Pipes and Poo co-creator and One Tenth Human’s Artistic Director, Sarah Punshon reveals more about what audiences can expect from the show, as well as how the show came to be. 

Pipes and Poo is described as a practical, interactive game-show, packed with science, fun and even a bit of dancing. What else can audiences expect? 

Ooh good question. There’s a rap! Some live science experiments. Some extraordinary facts! And a lot of important work by our volunteers from the audience. We play various games during the show, including “Spend A Penny”, “True or Poo” and “Chuck n Flush” – my favourite is probably “Chuck n Flush”, because the grown-ups have to get involved too! I love seeing families having fun together during the show.

What has the Pipes and Poo journey been like? 

It started nearly three years ago. We made lists of all the things kids love, and compared them to some of the biggest challenges chemical engineers grapple with. Pipes and Poo sprang out at us! Creating clean, safe water is one of the most vital jobs scientists and engineers do for us – and playing with water is one of the things kids love the most. 

As with all One Tenth Human shows, the project’s been through a long process of exploration, development and testing: we were lucky enough to get funding from the Royal Society of Chemistry to work with real chemical engineers, led by Professor Siddharth Patwardhan from the University of Sheffield, who taught us a huge amount about what really goes on in our water systems. We’ve also talked to engineers working for big utilities companies across the UK, and sociologists working on how we organise our water systems. And we’ve run loads of workshops and testing sessions, finding out what children and adults know and find interesting about all this: it’s amazing how little we all know about what happens to a poo after you flush the loo!

I think my favourite stage of development was when we took the toilet set-up out for the first time. We put it in a park as part of “Hulme is Where the Art is” festival, and invited children to make fake poos and flush them down the loo. When our sewage tank got full quicker than we ever imagined it would, I thought we’d have to stop for a bit. But then I watched as a team of kids aged 4 to 11 worked together to invent a system for filtering the water so they could reuse it – with hardly any adult involvement at all. It was wonderful to see the teamwork in action. That’s become a central thread to the show. We’re all linked together by sewage and water: we all impact each other, and we can all help each other, too, by how we behave.

The show is touring to all sorts of venues, including The Cluntergate Centre for Red Ladder Local. What are you most looking forward to about performing in different spaces?

Outdoor venues are a bit easier – you don’t have to worry so much about splashing the floor! And I love the more relaxed quality of the drop-in outdoor festivals, where children can choose how long they stay and help us with our sewage system. On the other hand, indoor venues allow the audience to sit down! And there’s a different quality of listening you can get when you’re in a comfy chair indoors, rather than outdoors competing with everything else going on at a festival… So I love both, but for different reasons.

What’s it like having performers like Ebony Feare and Hannah Goudie-Hunter involved in the show, especially as they were both involved in early sharings of the show?

Amazing! They’re both so brilliant, warm and witty and wonderful with kids. They’ve been a crucial part of the team creating the show, loads of the best lines are theirs! We’re so lucky to have them.

What do you hope audiences get from Pipes and Poo?

Loads of fun! And I also hope that elements of the show will live with them for a bit: that they might look at their toilets and their taps a bit differently afterwards. Once you really start to think about the extraordinary effort involved in getting some clean water to your tap, or taking the dirty water away again, you can’t help but be astonished by what people can achieve when we work together. 

Lastly…favourite bit of ‘toilet’ humour? 

Ooh there’s too many to choose from! But the simplest maybe is the best:

What does a poo say when it’s flushed down the loo? Weeeeeeeee!

Photo credits: Tom Arran

PIPES AND POO IS PLAYING AT THE CLUNTERGATE CENTRE, SNU 13TH JULY AT 2PM. BOOK HERE!