Profile
Biography
I am a Professor of Theatre and, since January 2025, the Head of the School of Arts and Creative Technologies. I’m delighted to be working with the brilliant staff and students in the School to develop exciting collaborations across teaching, research and creative practice.
My previous roles include Head of Theatre and Associate Dean for Learning, Teaching and Students in the Arts and Humanities. For several years, I have taught on the BA in Theatre: Writing, Directing and Performance and the MA in Theatre-Making as well as supervising doctoral research students.
My research addresses questions of performance, approaches to theatre-making and acting processes. I have recently co-edited Research and Development in British Theatre with Katherine Graham, Karen Quigley and Mark Love-Smith, all colleagues in the School of ACT. I am currently writing a book under contract to Bloomsbury, exploring the work of the National Theatre Studio. My past publications have explored acting processes for television, including Acting in British Television and Exploring Television Acting, both written with Christopher Hogg, and documentary theatre, including Acting in Documentary Theatre and Playing for Real, co-edited with Mary Luckhurst, alongside a number of articles and chapters.
I have held visiting professorships at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne and Concordia University, Montreal, where I was scholar-in-residence at the Acts of Listening Lab.
Research
Overview
My research interests include: acting theory and practice, television performance, verbatim and documentary theatre and television, modern British political theatre, and approaches to research and development in theatre-making.
My research addresses questions of performance and, in particular, acting processes. To date, I have published four books on acting. Recently, I have been researching acting processes for television with Christopher Hogg (University of Westminster), and have published a number of articles on this theme. Our work is the first detailed research into how actors approach the specific demands of television. Most research views performance via textual analysis of the finished product. By contrast, we use interviews with celebrated television actors to focus on their process, and how they bring their skills to bear on this particular medium. We have recently published Acting in British Television (Palgrave, 2017) and an edited collection, Exploring Television Acting, for Bloomsbury (2018).
My previous research has focused on how actors approach playing real people. I co-edited Playing for Real with Mary Luckhurst (Palgrave, 2010), which is a collection of interviews with high-profile actors who have portrayed real people on stage and screen. Interviewees included Ian McKellen, Eileen Atkins, David Morrissey and Joseph Mydell. I continued to pursue my interest in the challenges of playing real people in my monograph, Acting in Documentary Theatre, which was published by Palgrave in 2013. Including new interview material with over forty actors, directors and writers, my book was the first to explore the challenges of acting in documentary theatre.
Recent Research Papers:
- Sept 2024: ‘Theatre R&D: Practices, Processes and Influencing Policy’, TaPRA Conference held at the University of Leeds.
- Feb 2024: ‘Care and Tribunal Theatre: The Grenfell Tower Inquiry’, Performing Care and Carelessness Conference, University of Otago, New Zealand
- June 2023: ‘The Actor in the Doc’, Documentary Theatre: New Perspectives and Practices Symposium, University of Galway, Ireland
- March 2023: ‘Giving evidence: documentary theatre and approaches to listening’, Comparative Drama Conference, Orlando, Florida, USA
- April 2022: ‘Performing oral testimony: tribunal theatre and approaches to listening’, Performing Oral History Symposium, Greenwich University
- March 2022: ‘Documentary theatre performance: modes of listening’, Concordia University, Montreal
- December 2021: ‘Playing Real People on Stage and Screen’, Université de Picardie Jules Verne
- December 2021: ‘La question du jeu dans les théâtres documentaires’, Artcena, Paris
- March 2020: ‘Actor Training for Television Performance’, Visiting Researcher Seminar Series, LAMDA
External activities
Memberships
Member of York Minster Mystery Plays Charity.
I have also held positions on the Board of Governors of York Theatre Royal and York Civic Trust Education Committee.
