Theatre work
I’ve worked in London fringe theatre for the past ten years as a director, dramaturg, and playwright.
I trained at Royal Holloway with practitioners associated with the Royal Court, the National Theatre, Forest Fringe, and Goat Island, and I’ve spent the years since applying that training across a range of venues, companies, and forms.
Theatre and fiction are not separate interests. They’re the same set of questions asked in different rooms.
Theatre gives my fiction an understanding of character: how people really speak, what’s conveyed in what they don’t say and how one action can tell someone more than a page of explanation. Fiction gives my theatre work a novelist’s attention to plot, theme, inner life and the shape of the whole.
Directing
My directing work spans psychological drama, dark thrillers and classical text. I’m drawn to plays where characters and their relationships carry the drama. The kind of work where the set could fall down, the lights could fail but the tension would still hold. That said, I love creating theatre where every element, from lighting and sound to props, movement and silence, adds meaning.
Frankenstein
Tower Theatre, Theatro Technis, Camden, London 2018
Nick Dear has described Frankenstein as a “fairytale for adults”.
His adaptation begins with the Creature’s awakening into a cruel world he does not understand, before shifting to Victor Frankenstein’s point of view as the two paths converge in a confrontation of wills, with violent consequences.
In 2018, I directed Dear’s Frankenstein, marking 200 years since the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel. The production drew on my academic interest in Gothic theatre and adaptation.
Let Us Make the Flames of the Revolution Rage Furiously
Saw It Here First Productions, Theatro Technis Theatre, Camden
In an unnamed dystopian regime, a married couple are forbidden to express their love. Planning their escape, they begin to fear that their daughter, a member of the regime’s youth movement, may be spying on them.
Based on his family’s experience of the Hungarian uprising, Tom Pauk’s short play was part of a night of new writing.
Educating Rita
Educating Rita Lambeth Fringe, Network Theatre, Waterloo
Two people, one room, and a world between them.
To mark the 45th anniversary of Educating Rita, I directed Willy Russell’s two-hander for Network Theatre.
The production explored class, education, self-transformation and the romantic myths Rita and Frank hold about each other’s worlds. Set in the 1980s, it blended music, costume and spoken literary quotations from the texts discussed in the play.
The Lion in Winter — Current Production
Hampton Hill Theatre, Surrey · Studio · November 2027
The Lion in Winter is a fast-paced drama set over one Christmas, when the royal family gathers at their castle in France. Their arguments match any family at Christmas, only they’re battling over land, not who gets the remote.
I directed a rehearsed reading of ‘The Lion in Winter’ in November 2025. I have since been invited to direct a full production at Hampton Hill Theatre in November 2027.
My production will place James Goldman’s play in a stylised, game-board world, drawing out the play’s mixture of political strategy, family warfare and Christmas dysfunction.
Dramaturgy
Dramaturgy is one of theatre’s less visible roles, but it is really about helping a play work as a story.
A dramaturg looks at things like:
- what the story is really about
- whether the structure is working
- what each character wants
- whether scenes are in the right order
- whether the dialogue sounds true
- whether the play’s themes are coming through clearly
- whether the audience is receiving the story the way the writer or director intends
It’s a bit like being a story architect, editor and outside eye for a theatre production.
I trained in dramaturgical analysis with April De Angelis at Royal Holloway, and now work with directors and writers to help the drama of a piece come into sharper focus.
Playwriting
I studied playwriting at MA level.
Red Rock
In progress
Red Rock is my own one-act play, in development. A cave. Two siblings. Their mother, recently dead, refuses to behave like someone who has died.
It’s a play about grief, specifically the kind that has no obvious shape, the kind that gets tangled up with old resentments and unfinished arguments and the particular cruelty of people who knew you when you were young.
