Theatre

I trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and also with Dario Fo, Agosto Boal, Monique Pagneaux and actors from the Grotowski Theatre Laboratory.

Before training at the Bristol Old Vic I worked as the community outreach worker at the newly formed Wells Arts Centre (now Maltings Arts Centre) in North Norfolk.  I organised exhibitions, playschemes and large scale community performances as well as tearing tickets and designing publicity and working in a local theatre company as a performer.

My love of community engagement has continued to influence my work and I have directed a series of large scale site inspired inter-generational performances in Oxfordshire and Wiltshire near to my home funded by the Arts Council and Lottery Heritage.  I wrote and directed for the Young National Trust Company, an in house TIE company run by the National Trust and then for 17 years created devised shows with a company of performers with learning disabilities and/or physical challenges as part of Reach Inclusive Arts in Swindon.   As that work developed I found Forum Theatre to be a particularly engaging way to work with the company since it created such a strong relationship between the performers and the audiences and was a fresh way to work with issue based shows at the time.

I have performed in reps around the country and in small scale touring companies. In 2005 I wrote and performed my first one person show Another Kind of Silence about the marine biologist and environmental campaigner Rachel Carson. Outside the Box is the second solo show I have created. 

In my work as a writer and performer my main theatre mentor has been the rigorous and brilliantly adventurous director and dramaturg Annie Castledine. She died in 2016 and was described in the Guardian as “one of the arts world’s best-known secrets”.