”Such funny business from this one. Carry on like this and she’ll be buying a house, which is great but it’ll ruin my favourite of her jokes” – Jessica Fostekew 

Kate-Lois Elliott’s family lived in a secretive cult until her mum escaped. One generation later, a teenage Kate finds herself in the clutches of an equally militant operation… just your average group of teenage girls. Because, as it turns out, cults are everywhere – ask anyone with a Tesco Clubcard. The show centres around the true story of Kate’s family, who were brought up in a secretive cult until her mum escaped as a teenager.

Now, Kate is confronting her aversion to friendship cliques, discovering that she no longer gives a damn what anyone else thinks (sort of), and trying to figure out why it’s so impossibly hard to exit a WhatsApp group with your dignity intact. The show is about enemies, frenemies and how everyone just wants to fit in (without joining a cult).  

How To Belong Without Joining A Cult explores themes of group mentality in modern life – from school friendship groups and class systems to families and Fitness First. But, what about the young lady you will see on stage. I will tell you later how you can buy tickets, she’d be so upset if you didn’t and you wouldn’t want that, would you?

Stand-up wasn’t where Kate started out, but you always need to align your career with your values as Kate told me. “I was an actor who occasionally wrote scripts. I was working, but I was frustrated because the work I was getting didn’t always align with the stories I wanted to tell. I decided to try and write a one-woman show about a deceased Hollywood star from the 1960s who I loved (and who actually turned out not to be deceased, that’s a much longer story…). The show was meant to be comedic, but when my friend read it, she told me it read like stand-up. After that, I did an open mic and I haven’t looked back since.”

As for this show, it seems it was organic, it crept up on Kate and she was left with little alternative but to write it. “Before I even started writing the show, I’d been thinking about cults for a while…“

“It wasn’t always my intention to write a show about cults, but the more stand-up I wrote, the more I realised how much the experience my family had shaped how my mum brought me up. I’d always had an aversion to group dynamics, weird power structures and controlling behaviours. I only found out that my family had been in a cult in my 20s, so after that, it all sort of clicked into place, and I realised I’d inherited those behaviours from her.“

“I then developed a fascination with cults, because if my family had managed to stay in one for three generations, then it could happen to me (it could happen to anyone!). Once I realised I wanted the show to be about that, it was about getting the story down. The show does talk about my family’s experiences, but the bulk of it is about how culty behaviour is all around us – from the secretive cult at the end of your road to the gym to Mumsnet…“

“Some parts of the show were hard to write because I touch on hard-to-navigate themes (including experiences with bullying), but I’ve tried to be as honest as well. My family is notorious for using humour to coast through whatever’s happening, even in the middle of a crisis, so they mainly just want to know I’ve written a good joke.” Her family and probably quite a few of the audience, keen to step away from real life for a while.

“If you’ve ever been part of a group that’s felt a bit dodgy towards the end – an online movement, a podcast following, that 2019 Hen Do you thought you’d left…- then this is the show for you. I also ask the audience to tell me what their dream cult would look like, and we invent one then and there. At the end of the show, we get to decide if we’re going to join it or not…”

Speaking if you want to do something, I told you I would tell you how you can buy tickets. Pop along to Kate’s website for details of the venues and how to buy your tickets. Oh, and if you live on the coast and she has a show there, she may well be that person, gazing wistfully out to sea, margarita in hand!

Images (c) Rachel Sherlock