Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. He, with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson, was among the most successful and prolific of playwrights at work in the Jacobean period, and among the few to gain equal success in comedy and tragedy. He was also a prolific writer of masques and pageants.
The Revenger's Tragedy is an English-language Jacobean revenge tragedy which was performed in 1606, and published in 1607 by George Eld. It was long attributed to Cyril Tourneur, but "The consensus candidate for authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy at present is Thomas Middleton, although this is a knotty issue that is far from settled."
The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre: the revenge play or revenge tragedy. The play contains several violent murders and personifies Revenge as its own character. The Spanish Tragedy is often considered to be the first mature Elizabethan drama, a claim disputed with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and was parodied by many Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
Declan Michael Martin Donnellan is an English film/stage director and author. He co-founded the Cheek by Jowl theatre company with Nick Ormerod in 1981. In addition to his Cheek by Jowl productions, Donnellan has made theatre, opera and ballet with a variety of companies across the world. In 1992, he received an honorary degree from the University of Warwick and in 2004 he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his work in France. In 2010, he was made an honorary fellow of Goldsmiths' College, University of London. Donnellan was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to theatre.
Jack Shepherd is an English actor, playwright and theatre director. He is known for his television roles, most notably the title role in Trevor Griffiths' series about a young Labour MP, Bill Brand (1976), and the detective drama Wycliffe (1993–1998). His film appearances include All Neat in Black Stockings (1969), Wonderland (1999) and The Golden Compass (2007). He won the 1983 Olivier Award for Best Actor in a New Play for the original production of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz is a British playwright, screenwriter and former actress. She is best known as the author of Her Naked Skin (2008), which was the first original play written by a living female playwright to be performed on the Olivier stage of the Royal National Theatre.
Nick Dear is an English writer for stage, screen and radio. He received a BAFTA for his first screenwriting credit, a film adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion.
Greg Hicks is an English actor. He completed theatrical training at Rose Bruford College and joined The Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. He was nominated for a 2004 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award in the category "Best Actor of 2003" for his performance in Coriolanus at the Old Vic and was awarded the 2003 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards (Drama) for Best Shakespearian Performance in the same role.
Meredith Oakes is an Australian playwright who has lived in London since 1970. She has written plays, adaptations, translations, opera texts and poems, and taught play-writing at Royal Holloway College and for the Arvon Foundation. She also wrote music criticism before leaving Australia for The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and from 1988 to 1991 for The Independent, as well as contributing to a variety of magazines including The Listener.
Alan MacKenzie Howard, CBE was an English actor. He was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1966 to 1983 and played leading roles at the Royal National Theatre between 1992 and 2000.
Women Beware Women is a Jacobean tragedy written by Thomas Middleton, and first published in 1657.
Cheek by Jowl is an international theatre company founded in the United Kingdom by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod in 1981. Donnellan and Ormerod are Cheek by Jowl's artistic directors and together direct and design all of Cheek by Jowl's productions. The company's recent productions include an Italian-language version of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, Russian-language productions of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, an English-language production of The Winter's Tale and a French-language production of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Cheek by Jowl is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and an Associate Company of the Barbican Centre, London.
Patrick Myles is an Irish actor, filmmaker and producer.
The Ustinov Studio is a studio theatre in Bath, England. It is the Theatre Royal's second space, built in 1997 at the rear of the building on Monmouth Street. It is named after the actor Peter Ustinov who led the fundraising programme for the Studio's creation in the early 1990s.
Julian Grant is an English-born classical composer best known for a series of operas. He is also known for chamber music works and his challenging children's music. He is active as composer, journalist, broadcaster and music educator.
Nicholas Ronald Ormerod OBE is a British theatre designer and co-founder of the international theatre company Cheek by Jowl. In 1981 he founded Cheek by Jowl with Declan Donnellan, and they are the company's co-artistic directors. In addition to his Cheek by Jowl productions, Ormerod has made theatre, opera and ballet with companies across the world. He studied law at Trinity College, Cambridge before studying for BA in theatre design at the Wimbledon School of Art.
Samuel Adamson is an Australian playwright and screenwriter who has lived and worked in the UK since 1991. He was born in Adelaide and lives in London.
Grimeborn is an annual East London musical theatre and opera festival which coincides with the world famous East Sussex Glyndebourne Opera Festival. Founded by Arcola Theatre's artistic director Mehmet Ergen in 2007, the festival is held at Arcola Theatre in Dalston, East London. It takes place in and around August, and tends to showcase new and experimental works alongside radical productions of classic opera, using both the Arcola's performing stages.
Lucy Bailey is a British theatre director, known for productions such as Baby Doll at Britain's National Theatre and a notorious Titus Andronicus, described by a critic as "all eye-catchingly visceral but there’s little depth". Bailey founded the Gogmagogs theatre-music group (1995–2006) and was Artistic Director and joint founder of the Print Room theatre in West London (2010-2012). She has worked extensively with Bunny Christie and other leading stage designers, including her husband William Dudley.
Jessica Swale is a British playwright, theatre director and screenwriter. Her first play, Blue Stockings, premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2013. It is widely performed by UK amateur companies and is also studied on the Drama GCSE syllabus. In 2016, her play Nell Gwynn won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, after it transferred from the Globe to the West End, starring Gemma Arterton as the eponymous heroine. She also wrote and directed the feature film Summerland (2020).
