In Ubu!, Ma and Pa Ubu sail away in a boat. The boat is one of my favourite props ever. It's two flat bits of cardboard on two poles that are folded around Ma and Pa and it just looks like the flat …
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In terms of a process for the baby puppets in Dead Dog in a Suitcase was that Sarah and Lyndie (Wright) whipped up some prototypes which were brilliant, and we just spent an afternoon playing with …
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In village halls, you can’t pretend to be someone else. You have to talk directly to the audience, you have to engage with the tea urn, you have to engage with the children and the grannies and make …
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If you're testing a story out, you might make a shadow play of it. This is a great thing for teachers and for students, because a shadow play is a play without words. You're making a storyboard, but …
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Don’t labour your ideas. Ideas come easy and Emma always said that bad ones (ideas) usually take care of themselves (by dropping away). Be brave. Be present and respond. Be intellectual when you need …
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Bill (Mitchell) was a really great visual director, and his work was so visual. His designs weren’t just making sets for people to act in front of. They were playgrounds.
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We would try not to rehearse indoors too much, because if you stay indoors, you start talking your ideas out rather than doing them. Try and make the work on your feet.
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Audiences are different outside. They become closer to you. You’re sharing the same space. You’re sharing the same view.
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Months before rehearsals begin, I start work with the creative team. We gaze at books and films, sketch and begin to form a concept; an environment in which the story can live, in which the actors …
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In 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, the lighting design had to be really dynamic in order to tell us where to look, to describe locations theatrically without naturalism, really defining …
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In The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, light created magic.
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I like to see the workings of theatre. I like there to be magic as well, where you don't know how that's happened, but I like to see the workings of it too.
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When we started thinking about the musical landscape of Steptoe and Son we knew we wanted to use music to not just locate us in time but also connect us in memory.
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Kneehigh had almost three different sections - one of which was the touring shows, and there were the village hall touring shows, and there were the schools shows. Even though I trained as a teacher, …
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Live musicians bring an immediacy. It’s important to place the music and give it its full impact. I’m not keen on underscoring. A live band adds real power to the live storytelling. Much of …
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What’s unique about the Kneehigh process is that it’s about investment, ownership and generosity. The Barns was the thing for me, how isolated it was, how focused the work was and how the bubble of …
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Kneehigh already had a kind of a template, which was like a way of telling stories with their bodies. It became even more important when you took that work outside, we found we could tell stories …
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I’m a little bit sceptical of original ideas and of theatre makers “owning” ideas. Invariably, when I think I’ve come up with an original idea I find that someone else has already had that idea! …
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For me, there's an interesting feedback loop with Kneehigh. I watched Kneehigh and was influenced by Kneehigh and then wrote my own stuff. Then there's quite possibly my writing influence on …
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King of Prussia was essentially brandy smuggling back in the 1800s and it felt very relevant to Kneehigh, because there was a lot of political intrigue, as it were, within the writing of the show, …
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At the time, I was really inspired by Bruno Bettelheim’s book, The Uses of Enchantment (1976). He was a Holocaust survivor, and he had a thesis - which has now been discredited - that fairy stories …
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This show was created in the early days of Emma and Stu Barker’s working relationship and was mainly soundtracked: Wagner, Offenbach, Jurassic Five etc. The production was managed by the …
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The chorus in The Red Shoes were a chorus who’d seen things we should never have seen and done things we should never have done. We mingled with the audience. Before we started, we were barefoot, and …
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Both Emma Rice and I absolutely believe in the collective imagination of the room. If you can create the conditions for that kind of creativity, the collective imagination is going to give you far …
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