 | ||
Offstage Theatre (UK) is " An enterprising young theatre company ", based in Waltham Forest, London, run by Artistic Director and Producer Cressida Brown. The company's first piece was Home, written by Gbolahan Obisesan, Cressida Brown and Emily Randall in response to Beaumont Road, which was about to be demolished. The site-responsive piece functioned as "a valuable document of a people and a place just moments before an irrevocable change". "The project, which overwhelmed the creative team with its success" established Offstage as an ambitious site-responsive theatre company. In 2015, Offstage theatre were announced as recipients of the Kevin Spacey Artists of Choice Program. With KSF's support, they returned to Beaumont to create the sequel to Home, Re:Home. The production was performed at The Yard in 2016 and was nominated for Best Production and Best Ensemble at the Offies 2016.
Offstage are now also established internationally, staging a site-specific production of Macbeth in Paris to mark the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birthday. The production was featured on French news channel France 24, where director Cressida Brown and actor Florian Hutter were interviewed.
Other notable productions include 'Walking The Tightrope', ten five-minute plays exploring censorship in the arts, longlisted for Amnesty Scotland's Freedom of Expression Award. "Tricky, dangerous, stimulating, discomfiting – what serious theatre is for, in other words"., it was first shown at Theatre Delicatessan with nightly post show debates and panel discussions and the following plays:
In August 2015, 'Walking the Tightrope' transferred to the Underbelly for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with two new commissioned works from Omar El-Khairy and Timberlake Wertenbaker and was pick of the festival for both the Scotsman and the New York Times
The patrons of Offstage Theatre include Richard Rogers Baron Rogers of Riverside.