On Resilience – and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

It’s Christmas show season again. My feed is full of rehearsal shots, first-day selfies, opening-week buzz. New beginnings everywhere you look. But not me. Not this year. This year, I went up for five Christmas shows and I didn’t get any of them. One, I met every single criteria in the job description – but I didn’t even get an interview. One went to a local artist – fair enough but there ARE no local producing theatre opportunities where IRead more

How Lightning Boy Was Made

A brilliant, bold British musical by two extraordinary female writers – Liv Warden and Charlie Turner.  The first original musical to open under the NYMT banner since I became Head of New Work – and the first to be developed in-house by the company.  It began with our Readers Panel, who spotted its early potential. It was workshopped by the 2024 company members, who wrote characters and improvved the blues over a Charlie Turner dirty piano groove which turned intoRead more

What Three Words (and four entertainment concepts)

Picture the scene. I’ve just wrapped a brutal 70-hour rehearsal week for Lightning Boy. I’m finally heading home for a grand total of twelve hours – to unpack one suitcase, repack another, and get me and my seven-year-old ready to go abroad for four nights to Efteling, the most incredible theme park in Holland, for his birthday weekend. The job was done. I’d clocked off. And then the phone rang. Could I turn around four high-level creative concepts for CirqueRead more

Sparks in Public

Reflections on BEAM2025 – Mentorship, Musicals, and Making Room for Brave Work I’m still catching my breath after two days of BEAM2025 at Birmingham Hippodrome – the UK’s leading showcase of new musicals, produced by Mercury Musical Developments and Musical Theatre Network. From 360 pitches across 20 pitching days around the country, 28 new musicals and 12 individual artists were selected to share early-stage work with an industry audience. These weren’t polished productions – they were ideas on their feet.Read more

Building Brave Spaces

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week 2025, so it felt like a good moment to challenge myself to write something to mark the occasion – so here is a practical look at how I try to embed mental health awareness into the culture of the rehearsal room, every single day. Risk, Rest, Repeat – Directing with Mental Health in Mind We’ve all been talking about safe spaces lately – and rightly so. In theatre, where the work is emotional, physical, personal, andRead more

In Praise of the Portfolio Artist

(Or: Why “I Haven’t Got Any Work” Is a Lie I Keep Telling Myself) This week, my mum asked why we haven’t been asking her for much childcare lately. And without thinking, I replied: “It’s because I haven’t got any work.” Which is – of course – a lie. The truth is, unless I deliberately carve space, I work every day. Not always glamorously, not always healthily – but constantly. And the strange thing is, I almost didn’t notice. (WhereRead more

What Is Dramaturgy? (And Why No One Can Quite Define It)

Ask anyone to define dramaturgy, and you’ll get a lot of very different answers. It’s notoriously hard to pin down, mostly because it shifts depending on the project and the combination of people you have in the room. But since receiving the very welcome news that I was shortlisted for the 2024 Dramaturg’s Network Fellowship, I thought it was about time I was able to define what it is I actually do – after all – it’s a pretty poorRead more

The NYMT Summer Playlist

As we wrapped up another unforgettable NYMT season, one thing we all agreed on was how important music is to the experience—not just the show tunes, but the tracks that kept us energized during rehearsals, warm-ups, and downtime. That’s why we’ve pulled together The NYMT 2024 Playlist, a company-created collection of songs that carried us through the highs, lows, and everything in between. Whether it was for daily warm-ups, dance rehearsals, or just shaking off the intensity of the dayRead more

Principles of Deception – Rehearsal Pictures

Making a Magic Show is such a brilliant experience. Creating this piece with Ali Cook was incredibly inspiring – his skill, dedication and attention to detail is second to none and we were so pleased with these gorgeous photos of the process taken by Mark Senior. My top three behind the scenes highlights: Having to stand in for ALL the audience members (James and I making up LISTS of random names to put Ali on the spot and get himRead more

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