So I was doing some research into The Secret Agent and I came across a site with photos from the Czech secret police surveillance archives. My parents used to live in Czechoslovakia and I thought it’d be fantastic if there was a photo of them. But what would be the chances of that – a [more...]
Those of you who know us also know that most of what happens within theatre O is done very much ‘in house’ – that’s to say on no budget and by, well, us. So it’s with some sense of achievement that I can say that we (seem) to have a mobile site up and running [more...]
It had been my intention to write something each day of our development week at the National Theatre Studio – it turns out that wasn’t the only change of plan during the week! Interestingly (and perhaps inevitably), our plans had changed by the end of day 2 – but then that’s one of the joys [more...]
We’ve just come to the end of a very exciting first day working on The Secret Agent. We’re at the National Theatre Studio for a week, putting some of our Act 1 ideas to the test. Following a very productive development of the piece last year, we’re now checking to see if what emerged from [more...]
On Wednesday this week (18th) we will start to preview the show that I’ve been working on with Katie Mitchell at the Hampstead Theatre. It’s the UK premier of a play that Simon Stephens has written as a companion piece to Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi‘. January 2010. The International Criminal Tribunal sitting in The Hague. [more...]
First of all we’d like to wish you a rather bleated and very happy New Year. There have been so many world changing events over the last year, so many things that have made us examine who we are and why we do what we do – it’s a time of great change and great [more...]
This Sunday 15th January @ 8pm on BBC1 – CALL THE MIDWIFE Carolina will make her UK television debut with a fantastic performance in the latest BBC drama. I saw a screening of it a few weeks ago and it’s great – Carolina’s performance is very moving – essential viewing! It’s a series based on [more...]
So we’ve just finished a fantastic couple of weeks work at the National Theatre Studio. We spent the first few days generating a whole lot of material that would inform how we wanted to tackle our adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel ‘The Secret Agent’. It was all incredibly productive, and it feels like we’ve created [more...]
Tomorrow. Monday 31st. And we start 2 weeks of development on a new show idea. We’ve been completely blown away by Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ – it’s inherent theatricality, it’s relevance to today, it’s political and social themes. It’s an immensely complex book (despite the fact that it’s full title is ‘The Secret Agent [more...]
So last week we finally were forced to take the decision to get rid of all our old sets. We’ve received a huge storage bill for the last year and have the promise of another in a couple of weeks – our first step has been to reduce our 2 containers down to 1 and [more...]
We have bags and bags and bags (about 20 big bags probably) of costume clothing that we are giving away! There’s pretty much everything – dresses, skirts, shirts, work clothes, trousers, jackets, quite a few shoes as well. All incredibly useful when making/devising new work, but we’re trying to totally eliminate our storage costs so, [more...]
One of the things that I do outside of theatre O is to sit on the board of the excellent Pentabus Theatre. It’s an exciting time for the company and for the wonderful Orla O’loughlin who has been artistic director there for the past few years. Orla is off to be artistic director for The [more...]
On saturday night I went along to the OccupyLSX protest outside of St Paul’s. It feels like the movement’s not been getting the same sort of coverage over here as it has in New York and Madrid in particular. It was great to be there – I’d heard that the police weren’t letting people in, [more...]
The world of Facebook seems to be constantly changing – what you can and can’t do, who you can and can’t invite. We had a ‘group’ for theatre O, but now it seems we need to have a ‘page’ – but we can’t turn a group into a page, so it seems we’ve lost [more...]
I thought I’d write a bit more about Sheriff and where it’s come from. In fact, this is from before the week we spent, so it’s already evolved since I wrote it, but it gives an idea of the starting point. In reality it became about trying to find normality in the face of extreme [more...]
We’ve just spent an inspirational 4 days at the National Theatre Studio trying out some ideas for a new show. At the moment the piece is called ‘Sheriff’ and we’ve been looking at the ideas of frontiers, violence, motherhood and fear (amongst others)! Things veered wildly between the horrific and the hilarious. We want to [more...]
I’ve just finished working on ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness’ at the National Theatre with Katie Mitchell. It’s a beautiful production – go and have a look! A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood 4 STARS Evening Standard, Independent, The Times ‘A remarkably strong piece of theatre.’ The Times ‘Katie Mitchell’s striking, calculatedly provocative revival.’Independent ‘Robustly [more...]
If you are London based, go see… PENTABUS: For Once Running from now until 30th July @ Hampstead Theatre Book tickets here. “An elegant, elegiac three-hander winds, with wry humour and occasional mineshafts of buried feeling – Price’s writing, generously endowed with bitter-sweet [more...]