Guest Author

As a Director, reviving a show you’ve directed before can be a rare thing these days. To get another bite at the cherry is a gift, but it comes with a challenge, because what do you have to navigate now? Expectations. You’ve been a part of something that people love, helped to make something that has moved and inspired audiences and now you have to recapture the lighting in a bottle.

Being the first benefit-class theatre maker to have a double bill programmed at Park Theatre I’ve been asked to write about the barriers faced by low-socioeconomic creatives. There are monthly articles in The Guardian and The Stage analysing these issues in more detail than I ever could. What I can do, though, is tell you a hugely condensed version of my journey to demystify what it’s taken for me to bring tell me straight and aggy to the stage.

I'm sure I'm not the only woman who feels helpless navigating the world right now. I have moments of empowerment where I feel I can achieve anything, and I'm grateful to be living in the 21st century with freedoms women before me didn't have. I acknowledge my privilege here as a white woman living in the West. Then I see news about the Taliban's latest restrictions on women or the Epstein files, and I come crashing back down with sadness and rage, feeling naive for ever feeling that relief. Is it really 2026? Have we really come as far as we think? Will things ever truly change for us, and how can we learn from the past to inform our future?

Darwin Prakash burst onto the opera scene in 2019, when he made his professional debut in the chorus at Glyndebourne. Five years before that, he didn’t read music and had no formal singing training. The Indian baritone discusses his meteoric career trajectory and singing the role of Guglielmo in English National Opera (ENO)’s forthcoming production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte...

When I write, I talk to myself. Not quietly, not subtly - fully in character, with voices, intonations, and the kind of dialogue that shouldn’t be overheard by strangers in a café. It’s for this reason that I tend to write alone at home, where the only person judging my performance is my laptop.

16 Postcodes had a very long gestation period and a sudden sort of birth. I had been playing around with short form monologues, writing a few here and there but the concept really coalesced on the six mile walks I would take in Walthamstow looping around the River Lea during the pandemic when there was little else to do but think and walk. Totting up all my addresses over the years and arriving at 16, I had a title and a format in a way. What if I did 16 monologues? In an hour?? FUN, RIGHT?

What does it mean to ‘reimagine’ Noël Coward's relatively unknown play The Rat Trap?   First some context: To live in London with over one hundred theatres in the city is this former Drama Lit Major's dream come true. There are plays everywhere, not just in theatres but in pubs, in basements, in ‘found’ spaces, or warehouses. Plays of all shapes, sizes and quality. It's a theatre fanatic’s idea of heaven.

In the play Sorry for my English, the same question of identity resounds again and again: who am I? We are social beings, so the question 'who am I?' usually becomes relevant when we find ourselves among people, when we introduce ourselves to others. When I lecture, I am a teacher to my students. When I stage a performance, I am a director to my colleagues. When I go to vote in the parliamentary elections, I am a Lithuanian citizen. And to my mother, I will remain simply a son for the rest of my life. 

It’s been an interesting process creating the very first weekly classical concert series at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club together with James Pearson. We’ve developed several entirely new programmes, particularly for one of our programming strands, Close Up Classical. A great deal of time is currently being spent working out exactly which musical choices work best for each concert programme, as we’re dealing with a small stage (a maximum of seven musicians) and, at times, large-scale orchestral works that need to be cleverly reduced for a small chamber ensemble.

A Christmas Carol is one of the greatest stories ever told. Part of what makes it so brilliant is its universality and its malleability. There have been more adaptations of Charles Dickens's festive tale than the little knot of businessmen have had hot dinners, so why is it so often performed in its many permutations when, let's face it, the Muppets nailed it so exquisitely?

Dickens draws the most remarkable characters, there are few writers with whom we remember their characters above all else, but I think he is one of them. From Fagin to the Artful Dodger, Marley to Scrooge, Wilkins Micawber to Uriah Heep, he has created some of the most famous characters in literary history. What a privilege it has been to bring some of these characters to life on stage in David Copperfield.

I find myself once again poised to set sail aboard the peerless HMS Pinafore, with our production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s nautical-themed masterpiece opening at the London Coliseum tonight!

La bohème. Glyndebourne. Three trumpeters blare out a fanfare as the chorus pours onto stage, ready to deliver the myriad vocal interjections which mark out the beginning of Act 2. But Glyndebourne is No Ordinary Opera, and this is no ordinary scene. On a single musical cue, thirty-six choristers, dressed as Parisian waiters and cafegoers, unload and set onto stage eight tables and thirty-three cast-iron chairs, while delivering musical cues with pinpoint precision, in just 38 seconds. It is a feat of preparation, dedication, talent, commitment and painstaking rehearsal, and is an example of what makes the Glyndebourne Chorus one of the most special in the opera world.

There is no role in British theatre quite like the Pantomime Dame. The thrill I feel right now, heading into rehearsals at the legendary Stratford East, is electric. Stepping into a legacy that is equal parts mother, mayhem, and magnificent spectacle is an absolute gift for me.

This whole thing started with James Demaine. He’s into his occult, his gothic horror, his folk tales, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. It started with a raised eyebrow. It started in a technical rehearsal for another play entirely, three years ago.

Sophie’s Surprise Party, at its core, is a cabaret line up show. For those not in the know, a line up show is just a bunch of acts, one after the other, sometimes with a host, sometimes not. It’s a format we love, and one that we all cut our teeth doing. But we wanted to elevate that format, and evolve it.

My advice would be to don’t stop working on that thing. Whatever that writing project is. Feel free to become frustrated and put it away for a few weeks but keep it ticking away. I believe it’s immeasurably important for emerging writers - it is these spaces that shape the play, where mistakes can happen and solutions be found, without the pressure of a deadline or a looming opening night or financial stress. (On that note, we open 31 October at The Hampstead Theatre, please come?!)

I’ve been trying to ‘make it’ as a playwright for a decade. A decade of feverish all-nighters for first drafts, day jobs in retail, hitting brick walls on re-writes, and, of course, rejection after rejection - from writers’ groups, MFA programmes, residencies, awards, and open callouts. Now, in what feels a mind-boggling turn of events, I’m about to open my first professional production, and wondering if this is ‘making it’. And if so, how did I get here?