Twenty-one years ago, I was living in the beautiful city of Edinburgh, in a shared flat opposite The Gateway Theatre on Elm Row.  My mother had thought I was going to study English Literature in Glasgow and I was never quite sure whether she genuinely didn’t have a clue where I was off to for three years or whether it was because, as the first person in my family to have the opportunity to go to university, why drama school? Why acting? Because we ‘don’t go to the theatre – we got a colour tele!’ (True Dare Kiss by Debbie Horsefield).  The only link our family had to the th ..read more

I’ve spent too many unhappy hours in ambulances, A&E and chaotic admission wards with family recently (old and young) not to notice the utter disaster in the NHS over recent months and years. Crisis is the new normal. Throughout, I’ve been awestruck by the dogged professionalism of the staff – paramedics, nurses, doctors, and all the other folk who move calmly and purposefully around the corridors doing their jobs. They don’t see the chaos anymore, they work round it. No need to feel weary about continually asking for help nowadays: “Any chance she can have more painkillers?”, “I think he ..read more

Having been happily raised in a council house in the 1970s, I never really understood the British obsession with home ownership until I began to rent rooms from private landlords in the late 1980s. I lost count of the number of houses and flats I moved in and out of across Nottingham and Plymouth (including the West Wing of Mount Edgcumbe) and the endless short lets and theatrical digs from Leeds to Harrogate, Bristol to Cardiff, Lincoln to Worcester and everywhere in-between. Land and property ownership is an obsession in Britain for a good reason. Friends and family who still rent tell me it ..read more

‘I’ve bought my husband a ticket to your show – for Christmas!’ exclaims the nicest woman in South Birmingham (although I’m wondering now if her husband would agree…) Our show is someone’s Christmas present, or at least a part of someone’s Christmas present… er, no pressure then… I guess this is just another unforeseen circumstance that can crop up when we do a show after the Christmas/New Year rush.  Talking of which, I still haven’t written my biog for the programme and this blog post is a month late.   On top of that, I’ve eaten the two boxes of chocolates that would have mad ..read more

We’re delighted to announce our talented cast for BOLDtext’s upcoming show, Uncommon Wealth, at The REP 8pm Wednesday 24th January. Tyrone Huggins Joining our company once again is the wonderful Tyrone Huggins who has more than 90 stage productions to his credit, including Mademoiselle F by our very own Vanessa Oakes last year (The Belgrade), as well as many screen and radio appearances. He is a playwright of 17 stage-plays including Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie, The Honey Man and Emigrating Home. Tyrone continues to tour the monologue To Move In Time, a collaboration with Forced Entertainment which h ..read more

“The fact is the British public know that the consensus isn’t working. Lord Ashcroft’s poll on the state we’re in … revealed that 72% of people in Britain agree that Britain is broken, people are getting poorer, nothing seems to work. We need big changes to the way the country is run….” I couldn’t agree more. The only problem is that these words were spoken by Liz Truss who, in her 44 short days as Prime Minister, contrived to break Britain even further and make everyone much, much poorer. Even more remarkably, she said this after she’d completed her disastrous stint in No.10. Truss conti ..read more

BOLDtext are delighted to announce that Naomi Coleman will be joining our creative team to direct Uncommon Wealth at Birmingham Rep on Wednesday January 24th 8pm. Naomi is a theatre director and dramaturg from Stourbridge, having originally trained as an actor at QMUC, Edinburgh.  In 2018 she was appointed Associate Director at Artrix (Oleanna, After the End, The Memory of Water) and in 2020 commissioned to adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Shropshire’s Soulton Hall. Other credits include: Abigail’s Party (claptrapthevenue), Every Brilliant Thing (Newhampton Art Centre), Dramaturgy – Du ..read more

BOLDtext Playwrights are ‘in the building’ at The REP again, after a pandemic-sized absence, to share some of our brand new scripts.  We haven’t been slacking, we’ve been busy presenting site-specific shows such as Power of Invention at Soho House and Gem of a Place around the Jewellery Quarter, breathing life into the stories of proud Birmingham folk of the past. But on 24th January 2024 8pm, we’re excited to be back in The Door with our latest topical short plays, Uncommon Wealth. Full disclosure: we started working on this idea back in 2020 as Commonwealth Games planning commenced in o ..read more

That moment when you’ve finished your first draft is magical. All that work has finally paid off. You’ve finished. Your first draft contains everything you wanted to say. You are proud of it. Then you remember, it’s only the end of the beginning. There’s loads more work to do. You can’t become too attached to a first draft. You take it to your writers’ group and they tear it apart. They say some of the characters don’t seem quite realistic, they talk too much and start preaching at the audience. Your story doesn’t quite add up and your ending is a let down. That beautiful structure you planned ..read more

As we move into autumn with its lovely oranges, reds and browns, I have tendency to look back over the past months and wonder how quickly the year went and how short the summer was. Like it was ever any longer, or the weather any better. Were the summers hotter and longer in my childhood? Of course not. Childhood memories of long hot summers are selective memories of care-free happy days rather than lazy months in the sun. I remember one particular school visit to a farm in my sixth form. After visiting the animals and doing whatever went there to do, we were allowed free time. It was one of t ..read more