Scouting for Winghumans..

I’m looking to increase my network of talented, reliable and brilliant associate directors. I have a multitude of prospective projects-with-no-dates-yet happening over the next two years and I need smart people to create them with. Some projects are revivals, some reimaginings, others made from scratch. All of them are multi-departmental and require wide fields of vision and a strong sense of how to craft individual moments. All of them will benefit from a dramaturgical instinct – sense checking for creativeRead more

The Dreaded Cover Letter…

Applications: love or loathe, they are something we all have to navigate. After a morning helping a friend write a covering letter for an assistant director job, I thought I’d jot down some of the things we figured out together about what makes an approach stand out. And of course I’ve given all the sections song lyric titles because, well – why not. These can be covered in any order as feels most natural. ‘This Is Me’ Defining your identityRead more

NYMT Head of New Work

I’m so thrilled to have been asked to be ‘Head of New Work’ for the National Youth Music Theatre. NYMT is a company that is very special to me and has been a huge part of my life over the last almost-decade. I’ve been trusted with the development and premiere of an incredible catalogue of New British Musicals, many of which have gone on to have further life in schools and youth groups across the UK and beyond – asRead more

An online community

When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, I quickly became aware of online get-togethers and Townhall meetings run by organisations looking to support their artists, communities, and associates. Talking to my director mentees made me realise that there was a generation of graduate and emerging theatre creatives who hadn’t yet grown enough of a network to be invited to these spaces, so I put a callout on Twitter to see if anyone wanted an online space to hangRead more

#OpenHire

Errol’s Garden is going back out on tour for the summer of 2022, and as my wing woman Anna Hale isn’t available to work on the remount, I needed to recruit an assistant director for the tour. Having got a job myself via OpenHire in the last quarter of 2021, I wanted to advertise the role rather than pick a name out of my head. OpenHire was started by freelance directors Derek Bond and Josh Roche in September 2020, in the hope of improvingRead more

We won!

We only blinking went and won it!!!! As our technical genius and fearless leader Pete Hazelwood said in his acceptance speech ‘when you think of digital theatre you don’t imagine shivering in an October field in Ipswich dressed as the back half of a cow..’ but hey Mum, look where it got us! So much love to the company and NWT Family, the people of Ipswich and Pete Rowe at the New Wolsey for saying yes whenever he could andRead more

Pantomime Awards 2022

I’m so buzzing for the team that our pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk has been nominated in three categories at the Pantomime Awards 2022. James Cook has been nominated for Sound Design, Rebekah Hughes has been nominated for Musical Direction, and the show itself has been nominated in the Best Digital Pantomime category. It was a huge undertaking to create a show presented in digital format so I thought it was worth sharing a few reflections on how we didRead more

Get out of the weeds

‘Get out of the weeds’ is an instruction I give myself when I’m deep into rehearsal and starting to obsess about whether props are on stage left or stage right – or any other bitty minutiae that isn’t related to the trunk of the story tree but is easier to grapple with than life’s big questions. There’s a magnetism to those solvable tiny problems which can be a black hole for me – it feels productive but it drains myRead more

Two years to opening night

This week we opened the new musical Henrietta with the National Youth Music Theatre. Here’s a piece I wrote for the programme about the development process. #WeLoveNewMusicals – Henrietta from workshop to production Welcome to Henrietta, an utterly magical new musical written by Katie Lam and Alex Parker. This is the sixth new piece I’ve supported the development of as part of NYMT’s commitment to new British Musicals and it has already been on quite a journey. NYMT has premieredRead more

Back in the world

So I’ve recently returned to in-person rehearsals after a year of life being entirely online. And gosh – it was wonderful! Inspiring! Three Dimensional! Creative.. Collaborative.. ..but it was also a lot. I know that day will be approaching for lots of other people so I thought I’d document how it went for us, what we put in place to protect our bodies and our minds after a year out of the game and how those things made a differenceRead more

Ceilidh

We developed a new musical over Zoom. I didn’t know how to do that, but we figured it out together and excitingly (and somewhat surprisingly), it worked. Some context. Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie aka Noisemaker are currently developing a piece called Ceilidh, which is a wonderfully heart-warming piece about Scottish culture, and Ceilidh, and community. Having reached the end of a first draft and needing some actors to breathe life into it, Scott and Claire partnered up with GoodspeedRead more

Develop Your Creative Practice

Today is the first official day of my adventure supported by ACE’s Develop Your Creative Practice fund. I applied last October and I’m so grateful to have some time and space to think and plan and research. My application was based around making work with and for young people – an area of work that I’ve fallen into and love – but I’ve never properly done any training in. I’m researching the work of Company Three, an incredible youth theatreRead more

JoinedUp

This article was commissioned by and first appeared on the Liverpool Transition Town blog, which you can access here.  At some point around the beginning of March, I took up jogging. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it, but there’s nothing like being told you are only allowed outside for exercise to create an instant burning need to get on with doing that thing you never thought possible before.  Every day I jog past my local theatre. It’s aRead more

Don’t Tell Me Not To Fly

This has been a journey of collaboration and discovery, the first time I’ve been invited to pitch a concept and then bring a team together to develop that concept into an hour long Edinburgh show. The wonderful team at Underbelly asked me to suggest a format and initially I pitched the idea of a behind-the-people look at some of our favourite West End leading ladies, asking them questions that uncovered some of their favourite memories of their lives and careers.Read more