Ruinous Theatre ‘It is no accident that Terry Gilliam’s time traveling hero James Cole finds himself holed up in a disused theatre in his gloriously flawed film, Twelve Monkeys (1995). In a movie about the mutating possibilities of time travel set against the context of global catastrophe the scenes in the dilapidated Philadelphia Metropolitan Opera […]
The decision to adapt Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms came about for a number of reasons, the most important of which was a shared admiration among us for the novel. In fact, Soul Sister a musical which I’d co-written a few years earlier (and which was nominated for an Olivier award in 2012) contained […]
6 Degrees Below the Horizon had a very turbulent birth. It started life as a British Council project called Tales from the Bar of Lost Souls, a collaboration between three countries and three artistic groups: imitating the dog, The National Theatre of Greece and The Cyprus Theatre Organisation. We decamped to Athens for a month […]
Day 2 By the second day of the exchange, everybody was feeling a little bit more comfortable with each other. The initial ‘nice to meet you’ barriers were down, and we were starting feel more like a group who were working collectively. This notion of belonging was also the starting point for Bradley Smith’s session […]
Day 1 On a rainy a Lancaster Friday, a group of artists shared pizza, drinks and exchanged pleasantries. Fuelled by the community spirit and inspiration provided by Daniel Bye’s Tiny Heroes; this group were meeting to exchange more than just pleasantries, we were meeting to exchange ideas. Last weekend saw imitating the dog and Lancaster […]
imitating the dog, one of the UK’s most original and innovative performance theatre companies is one of 20 teams selected to take part in this year’s CreativeXR programme. The northwest-based company has been making ground-breaking work for theatres and other spaces for more than 20 years. Their work, which fuses live performance with digital technology, […]
The Zero Hour, or Stunde Null as it was originally called, was my third show with ITD and it drew on a number of preoccupations that I share with my colleagues Andrew and Simon. As fathers with relatively young children inevitably the first among these is a concern for what the future holds, particularly for […]
Heart of Darkness was written in 1899 at what retrospectively we can see was a transitional period in world history. What we understand now as global capitalism, and which had been anticipated by Marx and Engels half a century earlier, was beginning to be recognised by progressive intellectuals like Conrad who were appalled by European […]
Kellerman, made in 2007 and premiered in its full version in 2008, was ITD’s first large-scale work. Looking back, I am amazed how ambitious we were given that we did not have a reputation for making work that might tour to middle scale venues, nor the infrastructure to actually get venues on board to show […]
In 2003, I was feeling a bit lost. I’d worked on a commercial musical a couple of years earlier which had crashed and burned. Everybody I’d ever worked with seemed to becoming either rich, famous or both, and honestly, I was wondering whether the theatre and I had mutually given up on each other. So, […]