Directing

I am a theatre director, specialising in outdoor performance, contemporary clowning and puppetry and trained on the celebrated MA in Theatre Directing at Birkbeck College. I am the founder of Red Herring Productions which creates street theatre, creative walks and theatrical interventions in the landscape and have directed most projects to date.

I have directed many devised, outdoor arts projects including Ramshacklicious’ Club Supreme, Mufti Game’s One Kid and Their Dog, Miraculous Theatre’s The Brooklyn Healer and La Sybille and most Red Herring shows. I have developed a style of working as a director that looks less to impose my creative vision onto a show but to clarify and enhance the vision of the lead artist or ensemble. I spend as much time as a facilitator as a director, inviting all company members to share their ideas and to ask difficult questions. My experience shows that asking a team to take shared responsibility for creating a project, gets the best results, while as director I take the ultimate responsibility for making sure that it delivers in quality and on time.

Twilight on a summers day at the Valley of Rocks, Exmoor. We see a crowd of people with lights and a clog dancer dancing on an upturned barrel. A drummer is in the foreground.
A big blue sky with wispy clouds and an expansive, sandy beach. In the middle distance we see two figures. They are the Oystercatchers. They have human bodies and bird head masks. A half erected deck chair remains abandoned between them.
A man, wearing a leopard skin jacket and with outstretched arms. He looks excited and is shouting. Behind him is a caravan with bright lights and the image of flames projected onto it.
A red and white striped booth in the middle foreground. There is a rectangular performance space where 3 actors are performing as Punch, Judy and the Policeman. A large crowd of people has gathered around them.
Alice stands on a chequerboard floor, next to a huge cat. She is smiling and stroking its head. The cat is a puppet operated by three people. It has bright green eyes and is sticking it's tongue out.
It's night time. A man, wearing a shiny blue coat and a fur hat stand in front of a sign that reads UNBOSI United ideas and a symbol of the world with light bulb in the middle of it. He works for UNBOSI and looks proud.

I have also worked extensively as a performance director, taking responsibility for integrating performance into a large, technical production. For Walk the Planks’, Green Space Dark Skies, Exmoor I was responsible for preparing 400 members of the public to take part in a large scale interactive art work at the stunning Valley of Rocks. For Bureau of Silly Ideas’s Garden of Curious A’MUSE’ments, I supporting students, school children and local professions into extensive interactive installations at Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford, at Wisbech Castle in Lincolnshire and Newmarket.

I was Assistant Director at the New Vic Theatre Stoke on Trent (2011-12) and have continued to work with Artistic Director Theresa Heskins as Puppetry Director for many shows at The New Vic Theatre including: Alice in Wonderland (‘great work from puppetry director Paschale Straiton‘, The Guardian)., 101 Dalmatians, The Borrowers, Robin Hood and Marian, The Snow Queen (‘the puppets are elegant and clever’, The Times) and for the Olivier winning The Worst Witch for Royal and Derngate and Vaudeville Theatre.