A crowd-driven, devised comedy hour, Failed by Design harnesses the power of industrial design to celebrate engineering & inspire creativity with an out-of-the-box approach and an absurdist wink 😉

Allie O’Rourke and Cian Jordan, founders of Hysteria Comedy and trained industrial designers, lead a masterclass of a comedy that walks the audience through the fundamentals of manufacturing products. But this is no conventional syllabus; the duo come from a place of industrial disobedience. Following their Failed By Design’s run at the Dublin Fringe Festival, we caught up with Allie to discuss the show and how it celebrates the creative process above the final product.

From condescending customers to misogyny, Failed by Design tackles potent issues selected by the crowd. In every performance, Hysteria Comedy picks a problem, re-frames it, brainstorms ways to fix it, and invents a device to execute the chosen solution (a machine that tells annoying customers to f🤬k off? Yes, please!) Equally absurd and exciting, the show’s final minutes see the proud construction of a cardboard model, which is added to a collection of models from previous shows, forming an onstage memento museum.

The audience ensures that every night is radically different. The mix has included a room with only 2 people, folks returning for back-to-back shows & someone a legend in a Batman costume. Audiences are encouraged to take part in the silly fun & let loose their creative juices. 

The show was conceived during the 2020 Covid lockdown, but it wasn’t until Edfringe2022 that Allie & Cian started "scripted-prototyping" in a Free Fringe Burrito’n’Shake🌯 basement.  

According to Allie, the Free Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival allowed them to workshop the show & set housekeeping standards in order to create a safe space for audiences. Their brainchild would continue to develop at Dublin’s Fringe, creating a solid structure for the collaborative chaos they curate each night.

And Hysteria Comedy are impressive curators of humour. Building upon suggestions & a clapt-o-metre, a room full of strangers engages in a collective experience. Within this framework,  everyone can be creative, and each unique/messy/thorny problem becomes a fun task.

"The free fringe supports development", says Allie. "The show is never finished. It evolves". For an industry that fetishizes theatre as a product, obsessing over star ratings and box-office revenue, that is a refreshing thought.

Merrily embracing a meta-theatrical vibe,  Hysteria Comedy shamelessly presents theatre as a creative workshop that embraces an ever-changing result. Failed by Design encourages all of us to spend more time brainstorming, developing and enjoying our creativity rather than building the “perfect product”. 

You can catch Failed by Design at Bennigans Bar, Londonderry, on December 15, 2022. Tickets here.