People I Admire

Chickenshed
Chickenshed is a theatre company in North London and it is where I have spent the last two years doing my degree. Although Chickenshed is an organisation rather than one person, the staff that have created and built Chickenshed up over the years as a collective are who I admire. The reason I admire Chickenshed is because for the last thirty five years they have strived to create an atmosphere, a performance space and theatre that can be used and appreciated by everyone.
Their ethos is that theatre should be for everyone regardless of race, ablity, or background, and that by enabling these people to work together they can create beautiful beautiful theatre. I find them inspirational because even now, fighting against conventional ways of thinking is difficult, let alone trying to achieve this in 1973!

Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh is an English director born in Salford in 1943. He started as a theatre director and playwright but later moved into television and film. The way that Leigh works is that he starts with a basic idea for a script and then builds on his structure by taking ideas from the improvisation of his cast. He often doesn't tell his cast his ideas for his script, but puts them in senarios where they can develop their characterization and from this he notes their responses to the tasks and use these to develop his script.

I admire his work because it is not the conventional way of playwrighting and is not something that many directors use. I feel that this style of working is beneficial for the cast, as it helps them to discover their character and I think that this method of working is something that I may be able to use when workshopping with children as a way for them to come up with ideas for scenes and characters.

Bertold Brecht

Bertold Brecht was a German playwright and theatre director born at the end of the 19th Century. Brecht was renowned throughout the 20th Century as the creator of the very influential “Epic Theatre”. Brecht’s intentions behind epic theatre was to cause the audience not to identify with the characters on stage emotionally, which was the trend in naturalistic theatre, but to invoke the audience to question and debate the performance they were seeing. His plays often had a social or political message, and in inviting the audience to criticise the opinions on stage he hoped they would realise the social/political injustice and be encouraged to go out and make a change in the wider world. The reason why I admire Brecht is because he was the first practitioner to break the conventional stereotype that audiences were there merely to be entertained. Thus doing so this opens up a wider spectrum in theatre for audiences so that they didn’t just empathise with the characters but listened to the story at hand.