Introduction: Please don’t ask me
Before starting this course, I’ve always felt a level of trepidation when using the word “director” to describe myself. The defining characteristic of my career over the past decade has been working with young people. Initially as a teaching assistant, then a teacher in primary schools; on community projects like the National Citizen Service, and most recently in the creative engagement department at Leeds Playhouse. My job for the last 3 and a half years has mainly involved directing devised theatre with young people.
I often find myself feeling like I snuck into theatre through the back door. My initial undergraduate training was in theatre but I spent the first 6 years of my career working in a completely different sector. When I started working at Leeds Playhouse, it felt like I was using my experience working with young people to skip some of the more financially precarious early career steps that my peers in the theatre industry had taken. With this came a sense of imposter syndrome. Of course, I regularly direct theatre (see figures 1 and 2) but I often feel like I haven’t earnt the title of director – when people ask me what I do, I refer to myself as a facilitator or a theatre maker, but something stops me from using the word director. This is compounded by the fact that my practice currently sits in a participatory space, making work with, by and for young people. I know that my skills engaging with young people are a USP which have gotten me work in this industry, but the fact that my practice has until this point been with young people and community participants also makes me feel like the scope and scale of directing work I can undertake is limited.
I find it difficult to talk clearly about my identity as a director. As an early-career director I’m often asked, “What kind of work do you make?” This question fills me with dread, as the shows I’ve directed previously have been led by the participants I am working with. I have rarely been in a position in which I am choosing what I want to make work about purely based on my ideas and artistic voice. My focus within my participatory work is to make the young people I’m working with feel empowered as artists in their own right. As Boal says: “If the intention is to create theatre which liberates, then it is vital to let those concerned put forward their own themes.” (Boal, 2002, p19). In a participatory setting, being able to hold space for and give a voice to the young people I am working with is more important than my own artistic vision.
I know that being able to talk about my point of view as an artist and the work I want to make is an important factor in progressing as a director therefore throughout the Skills for the Theatre Creative module I was keen to pinpoint what my identity and practice as an artist is and be able to talk about it clearly. This is the line of enquiry that has led to the reflections which follow.
Some socio-economic context
When unpicking why I have taken my particular path into theatre, it is important to unpack my socio-economic background.
There are a range of ways to measure someone’s socio-economic background or class – they are all relatively blunt instruments which don’t account for the nuance and complexities of the British class system (O’Brien, D. 2021). I have outlined two of the most common metrics used here:
National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification
The National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) is a framework which many organisations use, including the Office of National Statistics (Office of National Statistics, 2010). It was also the framework used to measure social class in the Director’s Voice (Hescott, T. & Furness, C. 2018) A report commissioned by a range of theatre organisations which interrogated development and career pathways of theatre directors in the U.K.
Figure 3 is taken from the report and shows how social class was measured:
| A | Upper-Middle Class | Higher managerial, administrative, or professional. |
| B | Middle Class | Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional |
| C1 | Lower Middle-Class | Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional |
| C2 | Skilled working class | Skilled manual workers |
| D | Working Class | Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers |
| E | Non-working | Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the welfare state for their income |
(Hescott, T & Furness, C. 2018)
In line with this metric, my upbringing would be classified as working-class (D).
Index of Multiple Deprivtion
This is a geographical tool which measures deprivation in small geographical areas called Lower-layer Super Output Area’s (LSOAs) using the following categories:
Income
Employment
Education
Health
Crime
Barriers to Services & Housing
Living Environment
(Leeds City Council, 2025)
The LSOA I grew up in – Tameside 020F – is more deprived than 83% of neighbourhoods in England, and more deprived than about two thirds of the neighbourhoods in the local authority area in which it sits (see figures 4 and 5)
It is clear from this data that I come from a working-class background, but what does this mean in relation to my journey as a director?
The Director’s Voice (Hescott, T. & Furness, C. 2018) found that only 2.8% of directors working in the U.K come from the same socio-economic background as me – whereas 79% of directors came from middle-class or upper middle-class backgrounds.
The reasons for this are clear. In his article Class and The Problem of Inequality in Theatre, O’ Brien (2021) says:
“The harsh competition for entry to, and existence in, theatre and performance occupations are not experienced equally. Those from profession and managerial, middle-class, social origins are not only more likely to bring with them the economic resources, or capitals, to bear the costs of speculative engagements with an uncertain market for their ideas, talents, and labour. They are also more likely to have the cultural and social resources, or capitals, which offer them access to networks, along with the confidence that comes from having a sense of place and possibility within an industry staffed and attended by people like them.” (O’Brien, D. 2021)
This certainly reflects my own experiences. I was the first person in my family to attend University, and upon graduation, I didn’t have the connections, cultural capital or financial safety net to navigate the unstable world of early career freelancing. The Director’s Voice (Hescott, T. & Furnace, C. 2018) found that 39% of director’s first productions were self-produced (see figure 6). They say, “It isn’t surprising that a first production will often be self-produced – as an ‘unknown quantity’ often the only person willing to take a risk on a director will be that director.” While this is true, this is a huge barrier for working class creatives. In an interview with Lyn Garnder for The Stage, Director David Loumgair said:
“It’s an unspoken thing in the industry that you do unpaid work that builds you networks and relationships with venues, and eventually you start to get low-paid opportunities. The unpaid work and those low-paid jobs might lead to better opportunities, but they might not. And if you come from a working-class background, the potential rewards don’t marry up with the potential risks because you have no financial safety nets.” (Gardner, L. 2018)
When I graduated, I wasn’t in a financial position to self-produce a show or take the risk of unpaid work in the hopes it would lead to something better. I didn’t know people who could explain the arcane funding systems. While I had supervision meetings which included careers guidance, it felt clear to me that I didn’t know the questions I should be asking, to get the information I needed, in the way my middle-class peers did.
As a result of this, when starting to build my career I turned to the education sector, the path was clear, teaching assistant, PGCE, teaching job with a £30,00 starting salary. This gave me the social mobility I had been promised when secondary school teachers had encouraged me to go to university, without the financial risk that setting out on a career in theatre would involve.
Defining my practice
The first exercise I used to try and pinpoint my identity as a director was given to me by Esther Dix in a workshop as part of the module.
I was given a list of words which could describe my values and asked to tick any which resonated with me (See figure 7).
I was then asked to reduce this list of words chosen down to 10, and the reduce further to one word which I felt summed up my values (See figure 8).
I started to look for links between the words and grouped similar words – (See figure 9) this allowed me to analyse the words I had chosen, and what then meant about my artistic identity.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G |
| Beaty Calm, quietude Simplicity Style & Looks | Care for others Collaboration Compassion Community Cooperation Friendship Generosity Goodness Gratitude Harmony Love Openness Patience Respect Safety Security Service (to others, society) Sincerity Teamwork Tolerance Trust Understanding Unity Wellbeing Empathy | Country (love of) Faith Family Forgiveness Honour Loyalty Moderation Morality Preservation Rule of Law Status Tradition | Accomplishment Challenge Commitment Assertiveness Competition Contribution Courage Decisiveness Endurance Hard work Independence Power over Practicality Punctuality Responsibility Self-Awareness Reliance Success Tenacity Zeal | Adventure Creativity Curiosity Discovery Fun Hope Humour Idealism Imagination Innovation Living life to the full Optimism Pleasure Satisfying-self Spirituality Variety | Autonomy Change Democracy Diversity Equality Fairness Free will Global view Justice Money Peace, non-violence Privacy | Intuition Knowledge Learning Problem Solving Resourcefulness Wisdom |
Figure: Words in italics were chosen when there was no limit, words in bold when limited to 10
When I was able to select words, with no limit on the number of words selected, I noticed the following things:
- Most of the words I chose came from what I labelled category B. These were words which are related to interpersonal relationships and how we treat other people.
- The next most popular group was category F. These were words which were related to social or political progress.
- I was more inclined to choose words which are related to process or people, rather than choosing words which related to a finished piece of work.
When I was limited to choosing 10 words, I noticed the following things:
- I continued to favour the same categories.
- I removed all words from category D (words which related to levels of rigour) and category E (this was the least defined category but was broadly positive abstract concepts).
- Again, the words I chose were more focused on process and people over finished product.
Analysing my responses this way led me to reflect on why I often find questions about what kind of work I want to make difficult. The values and qualities I prioritised were focused on the process and the way theatre gets made, rather than the finished piece of theatre. This is possibly a result of the participatory spaces in which my artistic practice has existed up to this point. Whereas the success of a non-participatory show is measured by ticket sales or reviews (metrics which relate to the quality of the work made); the success of a participatory project is usually measured by a range of monitoring and evaluation tools which focus on experience of participants during the making process.
This is demonstrated by Developing Participatory Metrics (Arts Council England, 2015), a report produced by the arts council, to standardise how participatory work is evaluated. The report contains a proposed list of questions which would be used to evaluate participatory work (see figure 10). As you can see, the statements in this list mainly relate to the participants’ experience of the process, rather than the outcome created.
The question is, does the fact that the values I prioritised were a result of my experience in participatory theatre mean they are not useful values when talking about my practice as a director in a wider sense. A positive, supportive, empathetic process and the creation of excellent theatre are not necessarily mutually exclusive – therefore the compassion and empathy which drive my participatory work can also be a core of my practice as director beyond participation. In fact, in the current climate, I believe it is important that they are.
In an article for the Stage about the current exodus of creatives facing the theatre industry, Lyn Garner said:
“I suspect for many, the daily slog for survival has simply sucked the joy out of theatre as a career choice.” (Gardner, L. 2025)
The nature of being a director, being in a leadership role in a rehearsal room, means that whether I intend to or not, I will impact the atmosphere in the room. Katie Mitchell speaks to this in her book, The Director’s Craft:
“Many directors are not aware of the impact of the way they sit or what they do in the rehearsal room on the actors. For example, some directors sit slouched back in a chair with their arms crossed. This gives the actors the impression that they are judging the work or that they are bored. Others lean forward with their legs crossed, on leg jigging up and down. This gives the actors the impression that they are tense and nervous” (Mitchell, K. 2009, p131)
Actors are keenly aware of a director’s behaviour in the rehearsal room. Ultimately, the anxiety actors feel in response to a director’s behaviour can prohibit them from making bold offers in the rehearsal room and affect the quality of the final piece. Careful attention to the quality of the process is a contributing factor to the quality of the theatre made. A positive process, in which actors feel free to be vulnerable and creative, will lead to better work made.
This started to help me to reframe the way I thought about my directing journey. I had often felt like my participatory practice was something I had to justify or qualify to be seen as a director. In fact, the practice is my practice – whether I am directing a show with young people, conservatoire students or adult actors. The empathy and compassion I prioritize are valuable in any setting and make me a better director.
I wanted to interrogate whether the other things I felt I had to explain or excuse actually made me a stronger director and could form the basis of how I answer the dreaded “What kind of work do you make” question.
The stories I need to tell
I was keen to identify other experiences and parts of my identity that made me different from other directors – I felt that these would be the things which would help me pinpoint my distinctive creative voice.
In her book A Director Prepares Anne Bogart writes about memory. She talks about wanting to “feel the past and its people in the rehearsal room and allow them to influence [her] choices as a director” (Bogart, A. 2001, p23) and discussed the way drawing from their cultural backgrounds can give creatives “an endless reservoir of energy.” (Bogart, A. 2001, p23). I wanted to explore what the memories and past experiences which would give me creative energy might be.
I set myself a free-writing exercise, writing without stopping for 10 minutes in response to the broad stimulus of my identity. In order to analyse the result of this free-writing I created a word cloud which would identify words or themes that came up frequently in my free-writing – to ensure clarity I removed prepositions pronouns from the word cloud to balance the frequency with which those kinds of words appear in sentences. See figure 11 for the results.
From this word cloud the following themes stuck out to me:
Working-class
Nostalgia
Teenagers
These felt like themes which I could start to build a description of the kind of stories I want to tell around. Crucially they felt like ideas I have a unique point of view on.
Working-Class
As we have already unpacked, being a working-class director makes me an outlier in the theatre industry. There are elements of my lived experience which mean I am placed to tell stories about class in a way that middle-class theatre makers wouldn’t be able to. Plays about class often focus on the struggle and trauma faced by working class characters, or else working-class characters become harmful caricatures or stereotypes. At a panel event reported on in the Stage, directors argued that “working class representation in mainstream theatre is ‘stuck in the past’ and reinforces outdated stereotypes” (Masso, G. 2019) citing examples like Blood Brothers and Only Fools and Horses: The Musical. Being able to tell working-class stories in an authentic way, which celebrates the nuance and complexity of working-class people and the joy which can be part of that experience, as well as the struggle, sets me apart from a lot of other directors.
Nostalgia
I am facinated by the idea of nostalgia. This is not something unique to me, but nostalgia is a phenomenon which feels particularly prescient to millennials (the generation which I belong to).
In an article for Medium, Kelsey L.O. reflects that for millennials “there is a definitive before and after – personally and generationally – when life felt more secure and the path before us was filled with opportunity” (L.O., 2023) and it’s suggested that this retreat to nostalgia is a “unconscious collective reaction to all the profound, non-stop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts.” (Andersen, K. 2012).
It can be argued that millennials are so prone to nostalgia because we are trying to return to a point before the rapid change and socio-economic turmoil which has defined our adulthoods. As someone from a working-class background who was the first in my family to attend university and is now trying to forge a career in a statistically middle-class industry, this is something I can particularly relate to. There was a level of social mobility which I was told academic success and higher education would afford me. As we have already unpacked in a variety of ways, the truth is more complex.
Teenagers
As already outlined, I have spent a lot of my professional life working with teenagers. The teenagers I have worked with have been complex, multi-faceted human beings, with interesting stories to tell. I spend a lot of my time advocating for them in the face of adults who refuse to imagine them complexly. I care passionately about supporting people to understand and show empathy towards teenagers.
This is also something that has been shaped by my working-class background. In 2008 I was a teenage girl called Lauren. One of the most recognizable teenagers in British pop-culture at that time was Catherine Tate’s character Lauren Cooper, who’s catchphrase “Am I bovvered?” was used ubiquitously to signal teenage anti-social behaviour (The Catherine Tate Show, 2004). This character, along with Matt Lucas’s Vicky Pollard (Little Britain, 2003) cemented harmful stereotypes about working class teenage girls – so much so that as a teenager I stopped going by Lauren and started using an abbreviation of my middle name, to avoid the negative connotations.
My teenage years fell during of the short-lived enforcement of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) which were introduced by Tony Blair’s government (Crime and Disorder Act, 1998) and were replaced in 2014 ( Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, 2014) and which unfairly targeted young people (Brown, D. 2013). I spent my teenage years hearing the word “chav” used to insult people who looked and sounded like me and came from places like the place I came from (Tyler, I. 2006).
As a teenager I had a keen awareness that adults saw me and my peers as a dangerous, anti-social nuisance, and part of the reason I am committed to working with young people now, is to try and ensure that the next generation of teenagers don’t grow up feeling like this. Rather than my work with young people being something I need to qualify or work around, it is something which directly informs the theatre I want to make and the stories I want to tell.
I had started building a framework of the subject matter which I have something different or unique to say about. This was the core around which I could build an answer to “what kind of work do you want to make.”
Finding Blackthorn
Having started to construct an answer to the unavoidable question “what kind of work do you make?” It was time to commit to making a piece of work.
I wanted to make a show which spoke to the working-class experience, more specifically one which interrogated adolescence or coming of age, and which explored nostalgia or the millennial experience. I was solidifying what kind of work I wanted to make, but I still needed to develop my ability to bring my point of view to an existing text.
When I first read Blackthorn (Miles, C. 2016), I immediately felt like I was in a world that I knew. Set in a small northern village, the play charts the childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of two characters, the first two children born in the village for 20 years.
As I started exploring the world of the play, I realised there was a specificity that my experiences brought, which other directors may not bring to this text. I knew exactly where my version of the village was (a small town called Mossley, which sits between Manchester and the edge of the Pennines, 15 minutes away from where I grew up). While the show is not explicitly set in a particular time, there were clues in the text which placed it as spanning roughly from the late 1990s to the 2010s – fertile ground to explore the millennial nostalgia I am interested in. Central to the conflict within the play is the disappearance of the farming industry which had previously provided financial security for many of the villages residents. While the primary industry in town I grew up in was textile manufacturing rather than farming, I certainly understand the complexities of growing up in a place which has had its central industry removed.
In doing preparation and pre-production work for Blackthorn, I was building a clear understanding of what my version of this play was – in a way I hadn’t been able to in my previous work. For the first time, I could see clearly what my contribution as a director was to the artistic vision of this play.
The most exciting thing for me, is that my particular artistic vision for Blackthorn is one I am able to have not in-spite of my working class background and my work with young people (which I have so often seen as a barrier to being taken seriously as a director) but explicitly because of it.
Conclusion: So what kind of work do I make?
When I started this course, I struggled to answer when people asked me, “What kind of work do you make?” I have spent my career in theatre so far working in participatory settings where what I want to make is not the most important thing. In addition to this, I felt that my working-class background and my path into the industry were barriers to seeing myself as a director. While I was comfortable calling myself a facilitator or a theatre-maker, director felt like a title I hadn’t earned.
In his foreword to The Director’s Craft Nicholas Hytner says: “It is still the case that in the British Theatre, most directors become directors by saying ‘I am a director’ and hoping that someone will believe them” (Mitchell, K. 2009). Perhaps it is time for me to start following the lead of the middle-class men who have come before me. I am a director. I make authentic work about class, which comes from a place of lived experience. I am passionate about the rights and wellbeing of young people and make work by, with and for them, which recognises the complexity and humanity of the teenage experience. I make work which examines the millennial pre-occupation with nostalgia and how it intersects with socio-political environment in which we have come of age – in particular the ways this disproportionately affects people from working-class backgrounds.
I am looking forward to directing a play that speaks to all of these things, and excitingly, I am one of a small minority of directors in the U.K. who can make this work from a place of authenticity and lived experience.
References
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Boal, A. (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors 2nd Edition. London: Routledge.
Bogart, A (2001) A Director Prepares, Oxon: Routeledge
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Little Britain (2003) BBC Three, 9 February 2003
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Masso, G. (2019) ‘’Working-class representation in theatre stuck in the 1980s’ industry panel argues’ The Stage [online] Available at https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/working-class-representation-in-theatre-stuck-in-the-1980s-industry-panel-argues [Accessed 15.04.2026]
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