Directing/Translating

I first directed at York University and on the London Fringe in the 80s & early 90s (Sartre’s The Respectable Prostitute at The (now long-gone) Man in the Moon, Chelsea; Berkoff’s Harry’s Christmas at The Club for Acts & Actors, among others).

But I started directing plays more regularly with writer-performer gemskii’s one-woman show about Joan Littlewood Joan, Babs & Shelagh Too in 2016, then began a sustained working relationship with Max Dickins, on his two monologues The Trunk (Edinburgh 2016) and The Man on the Moor (Edinburgh 2017, Tour 2018), then on his first 2-hander Kin, for Edinburgh 2018, with Abigail Burdess and Kate Alderton. I directed Fiona Coffey’s Honey’s Happening for a summer tour in 2019, an online reading of Andrei Kureichik’s Insulted during lockdown, and most recently a showcase of Diary of a DJ Widow by Lucy Trodd at The Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury.

As a translator, I have worked on plays by Sartre, Camus, Giraudoux, Maeterlinck, Schehadé and de Ghelderode. Though none have yet been fully produced professionally (I directed Sartre’s Dirty Hands, my first translation, at university and performed my monologue version of Camus’ L’Etranger, translated as A Man Outside, while at drama school), my version of Giraudoux’s modern fable The Madwoman of Chaillot was shortlisted for the Gate Theatre’s biannual translation prize in 2004, and readings have been held of Maeterlinck’s Interior in 2007 (at the Uniojn Theatre) and Sartre’s The Unburied Dead (Morts Sans Sepultures) in 2013. Since the end of 2020 I have been translating tabletop games for several French companies, principally BLAM! from Annecy

I have also translated two other plays by Maurice Maeterlinck, The Miracle of St. Anthony and Tintagel; two by a wonderful French-Lebanese playwright much championed by Jean-Louis Barrault, Georges Schehadé, The Voyage and Mr.Bob’le, and Michel de Ghelderode’s Escorial.