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. Our projects look to create opportunities for people to join in, as active audience members or participating more fully.

These projects range from small scale projects…

For example, we were commissioned by the North Devon Coast National Landscape for the Nature Calling programme, to run a series of creative walks with a group of women from ethnically diverse backgrounds culminating in a photography exhibition.

…to large scale, nationally significant projects…

We were the local partner for For Walk the Planks’, Green Space Dark Skies in Exmoor (Unboxed 2024) and as Artistic Director, 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.

Much of our work aims to connect ever strongly with local communities in North Devon. The Egg Shack involved consulting community groups to gather stories and find starting points for characters and a community cast of local volunteers.

I have directed many devised, outdoor arts projects for other companies, including Ramshacklicious’ Club Supreme, Mufti Game’s One Kid and Their Dog, Miraculous Theatre’s The Brooklyn Healer and La Sybille. When working outside Red Herring, 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.

I have also worked extensively as a performance director, taking responsibility for integrating performance into a large, technical production. For Walk the Plank’s Midsummer Mystery (Bodo Capital of Culture 2024), I trained members of Bodo based theatre company Salten Friteater, who had no experience of outdoor performance and directed them within a large scale spectacular. For Bureau of Silly Ideas’s United Nations Board of Significant Inspiration, I supporting students, school children and local professions to take part in a series of 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.