British Theatre Guide podcast

Pilot Theatre is based in York in the UK, but for its latest project has collaborated with an Australian playwright on an adaptation of an Australian novel. The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon has received award nominations for both the Carnegie and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for a story about a young refugee born in an Australian permanent detention centre. The adaptation has been writte...

With Panto Season 2021 now well under way, BTG Panto Editor Simon Sladen caught up with award-winning writer, composer, actor and musician Vikki Stone. This year, Vikki has penned Aladdin for the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, having previously appeared at the venue as Abanazar and Fleshcreep. They discuss Vikki's pantomime career, challenges facing the genre today and top tips for budding pantomime w...

Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were brought to the stage in 2014 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, adapted by Mike Poulton and directed by Jeremy Herrin. The third in the series, The Mirror and the Light , has opened at the Gielgud Theatre, again directed by Herrin but this time adapted by Mantel herself with Ben Miles, who has played the central...

Mark Ravenhill has been well known as a British playwright since the 1990s, when he was a leading figure in the group of writers labelled 'In Yer Face'. Director Hannah Price was founder and Co-Artistic Director of Theatre Uncut and a Resident Artistic Director at the Donmar Warehouse. From 1 October 2021, Mark and Hannah will take over as joint Artistic Directors of the King's Head Theatre , Lond...

After the cancellation of the 2020 Edinburgh Festivals due to the coronavirus pandemic, apart from a small number of online shows, the 2021 festivals are going ahead, with some shows happening in front of live audiences and some online. BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Fringe performer, writer, director and producer Guy Masterson, in Edinburgh to perform a cut-down version of his one-man Under...

After a record-breaking year in 2019, with more than 600,000 attendees, Brighton Fringe had to cancel its 2020 festival at fairly short notice due to the first lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic in England. However, the Fringe is back for 2021, slightly later in the year than usual, with a hybrid live and online programme of events. BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Brighton Fringe CEO Julian...

#WeMakeEvents was launched in April 2020, soon after the first coronavirus lockdown, by PLASA, the Professional Lighting and Sound Association, to highlight the plight of its membership, the majority of whom are freelance workers and therefore not eligible for government furlough payments. The campaign has grown to include other industry bodies and has become a global movement, with major performa...

Hear Me Out is a new theatre podcast produced and presented by Lucy Eaton, the both real and on-screen sister of Simon Evans, creator of BBC lockdown comedy Staged starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen. Hear Me Out features interviews with leading theatre actors in which they discuss and then perform a speech from a play in which they have appeared which holds particularly strong memories for t...

At the beginning of each year, The Theatres Trust produces a document known as the Theatres At Risk Register, which lists the theatre buildings in the UK which are at the most risk of being lost forever. Just after the 2021 Register was released, BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Theatres Trust Director Jon Morgan about this year's list, the work of the Trust in general and the extra help it ha...

In January 2020, BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Elizabeth Newman, Artistic Director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre in Scotland, about her plans for the coming year. Less than two months later, the country shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. The season was cancelled and the future of this theatre, amongst many others around the country, looked bleak, but it continued to commission and p...

Leading black British theatre company Talawa , which will celebrate its 35th birthday in 2021, is releasing a series of short online films titled Tales from the Frontline that examine the experiences of black frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic through monologues compiled from the words of real people through interviews. BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Talawa's Artistic Director...

Peter Polycarpou, an actor with a long and distinguished history in musical theatre, was about to revive a production that he had written called Falling Stars at London's Union Theatre when the second coronavirus lockdown was announced. Rather than cancelling entirely, the production, performed by Peter with Sally Ann Triplett and directed by Michael Strassen, was recorded to be made available onl...

Pursued by a Bear , a theatre company based at Trestle Arts Base in St Albans, Hertfordshire, was preparing a tour of a new project, Nothing on Earth written by Anna Reynolds, before the coronavirus lockdown. As the tour couldn't go ahead as planned, it was used as the inspiration for a series of short web films called Nothing on Earth: Shorts . BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Pursued by a Be...

As some theatre performances are starting to open in the UK after more than five months of lockdown due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the people in charge of UK theatres have had to make some very difficult decisions in order to survive. To get the perspective of theatre management on the current situation, BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Roddy Gauld, Chief Executive of the Octagon Theatr...

Cornwall's Kneehigh theatre company was due to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to postpone any celebrations. After five months of lockdown, the company has released a strategy document, Strike Out! , focussing on its plans for creating art and performance in a post-pandemic world. Just after its release, BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Kneehigh foun...

Theatre company Told by an Idiot will be one of the first theatre companies to resume performances to live audiences after the coronavirus lockdown when it takes part in the Greenwich+Docklands International Festival with a revival of its family show Get Happy at outdoor venues. BTG Editor David Chadderton spoke to Told by an Idiot founder Paul Hunter, who is directing the piece, during rehearsals...

Tara Arts is a London-based multicultural theatre company which has only had one artistic director, Jatinder Verma MBE, since it was formed in 1977 until he stepped down earlier this year. He will be replaced by Abdul Shayek, a director originally from East London who has spent the last nine years based in Cardiff, initially working with National Theatre Wales and for the last four years running F...

Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak's musical Godspell , based on the Gospel of St Matthew, is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. To commemorate this, Thomas Hopkins & Michael Quinn for Ginger Quiff Media in association with Manchester's Hope Mill Theatre are to stream an online concert version of the musical in August 2020 with a cast headed by West End stars Ruthie Henshall, Darren D...

No Milk for the Foxes was a one-act play written and performed by Conrad Murray and Paul Cree for Beats & Elements at Camden People's Theatre in 2015 that looked in on the lives of two young, working-class lads, Marx and Sparx, working as security guards on zero-hours contracts and which used beatboxing and live looping between dialogue scenes. An archive recording of this production has now been...

New Perspectives Theatre Company has teamed up with writer David Rudkin to produce a ten-part audio series called PlacePrints . Rudkin has written stories set in different locations around the British Isles and they've been recorded over the past four years. The cast includes Michael Pennington, Toby Jones, Juliet Stevenson and Stephen Rea. In this episode, Steve Orme speaks to Jack McNamara from...

Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield is producing a star-studded multi-cast audio play, The Understudy , an adaptation by Henry Filloux-Bennett of a novel by David Nicholls about an actor who is failing in most aspects of his life. The cast includes Stephen Fry, Russell Tovey, Emily Atack, Sheila Atim, Layton Williams, Sarah Hadland, Mina Anwar, Jake Ferretti, Sasha Frost, Marie Lawrence, James...

Slung Low , a theatre company founded in 2000 and currently based in the oldest social club in Britain in Holbeck, Leeds, programmes work in its own performance spaces but also creates large-scale works in non-theatre spaces, often involving large community casts. During the coronavirus lockdown, Slung Low is releasing a short film, The Good Book , written by James Phillips with a cast of three pr...

In common with most of the UK's theatres and other arts venues, HOME Manchester announced it would close soon after Prime Minister Boris Johnson's statement on 16 March 2020 appealing to the public to stay away from public places to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. A week later, HOME announced a series of commissions, titled Homemakers, from artists asking them to devise new works in their ho...

For the second successive year, Derby Theatre is producing a major show featuring fully integrated British Sign Language and captioning. In 2019, the theatre presented Neil Duffield's adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book ; in 2020 Treasure Island will get similar treatment. For this episode, BTG Midlands editor Steve Orme chats to Derby Theatre's artistic director Sarah Brigham about th...

Amy Leach is a theatre director and Associate Director at Leeds Playhouse, currently working on a new version of Oliver Twist . This new adaption is by Bryony Lavery, and it's being staged by Leeds Playhouse in collaboration with the Ramps on the Moon consortium, a partnership between six National Portfolio Organisation theatres and Graeae Theatre. Ramps on the Moon aims to create change within th...