Manifesto

Here's a wild guess: somewhere between discovering fire and inventing the wheel, humans created theatre. Put it this way: it's been around a long time, helping us to make sense of our world or understand that sometimes there's no sense in looking for sense.

I feel part of this tradition and want to make theatre that matters to people: complex but accessible; about love and loss and faith and fear; theatre that invites us to look at ourselves and laugh or weep or shout or dance, often tempered with comedy but never shy of deep emotion.

My work ranges across many genres and I am often asked to write or direct for specific audiences from young children to older people in care but here are three quotations that inform everything I do:

Theatre is a place where things happen Peter Brook         

Ideas emerge from plays; not the other way round Sam Shepard

What is there left for us that have seen the newly discovered stability of things changed from enthusiasm to a weariness but to rediscover an art of the theatre which shall be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant and altogether reckless? W B Yeats

In all my work I actively welcome the collaboration of fellow artists.