My first professional role came at the age of seventeen playing Algernon in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest opposite the writer Aidan Chambers, playing Earnest.
It proved a great learning curve.

During my three years at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, I managed to land a comic role at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre, which then transferred to the Lyric Theatre in London’s West End. I also made numerous BBC radio and television debuts during this same period.

I then joined The Crystal Theatre of the Saint, an avant-garde theatre company based in Bristol. Surrealistic, slow moving and silent, full of dream-like atmospheres, telling imagery and music, they restored the sense of theatrical magic and invention I had lost on the classical road. It was truly experimental, and the cross-over of disciplines had a powerful effect on my idea of theatre from then on. Theatre as painting, movement as poetry, silence as music…those were the days.

One performance, given in The Hoxton Hall, one of the oldest music-hall theatres in East London, lasted for over four hours. It was packed every night, elderly cockney ladies knitting in the front row, returned the following evening for a repeat performance. It persuaded me that the avant-garde doesn’t always have to be elitist and incommunicable, magic speaks to most people on some level, even my portrayal of a semi-naked Christ singing an old Russian lullaby while suckling a large Trout.

Total and Essential Theatre:
In my personal development as an actor, dancer, theatre maker and director I have been greatly influenced by the work of Peter Brook (The Empty Space) and Jerzy Grotowski (Towards The Poor Theatre.) Inspired by these two luminaries, I began my own development towards a Total and Essential Theatre. Total, in that no form is excluded as a possibility or necessity of expression. Essential, in that it uses only the essential elements to create a dynamic, living theatre, the performer always remaining pivotal.