Guest Author - Page 2

Ten years ago, we introduced the world to a two-foot puppet made of cloth at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe. Little did we know that Fred would take us to over 145 cities across 20 countries and three continents, seen by 25,000 people. Not bad for a scrap of fabric with something to say.

As a grown-up theater kid, seeing a Broadway actor out and about in the “real world” always had a bit of a “seeing a teacher in the grocery store” feeling to me.

Firstly, I guess I should start off by introducing myself. My name is Tosh Wanogho-Maud, and I’m playing Lola on a Monday and perhaps a few other times that circumstances might allow in the brand-new production of the Olivier, Tony and Grammy Award-winning Kinky BootsThe Musical.

As the stigma around therapy continues to fade and people speak more openly about their experiences, the language of therapy has quietly slipped out of the consulting room and into everyday conversation.

Laura K Bailey was cast as J.K. Rowling in a play that drew widespread attention at the Edinburgh Festival in 2024. Her new show, Rowling In It, revisits that experience, exploring the complexities of being a cis woman navigating a world where identity, voice, and visibility are under scrutiny — and where remaining neutral is not always a neutral act.

Ruth Ellis was a nightclub hostess who shot and killed her violent upper class lover after a long abusive relationship.  She was executed for the crime in 1955, making her the last woman to be hanged in England. 

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!