Hi,
I’m a director and creative leader working across theatre, television and film.
⇩
Selected Work
BATS THEATRE
In 1989, aged 24, I took over the lease of the run-down BATS Theatre in Wellington with Simon Elson.
Together, we established it as Wellington's fourth professional theatre, creating a new identity centred on new work, emerging practitioners and new audiences.
We wanted theatre to feel less like an institution and more like a rock gig — immediate, affordable, unpredictable and alive.
BATS became an incubator for new writers, directors, designers and performers — a place where artists could take risks, find an audience and make work on their own terms.
It was an early lesson in something that has shaped my work ever since:
Great creative environments enable great creative work.
HOW I WORK
I create the conditions for artists to do their finest work — and take responsibility for what emerges.
I believe the best work comes from a combination of freedom and rigour.
For me, the process begins with the text. I interrogate it deeply — its characters, relationships, structure, language, rhythms, contradictions and possibilities. What is the writer really asking? What is beneath the surface? What does the audience need to understand, and what might be better left unexplained?
That investigation becomes the springboard for the creative decisions that follow.
Rehearsal is then a place for curiosity, experimentation and play. I want actors and collaborators to feel able to take risks, make mistakes and discover things that none of us could have arrived at alone.
But freedom without structure is rarely useful.
My job is to create the framework in which that exploration can happen — to establish a clear intention, ask the right questions, listen closely, and keep the work moving towards something.
I work from the text and performers outwards. I pay close attention to the individual actor, the relationships within the ensemble, and the rhythm and shape of the whole. I encourage discoveries, but I also curate them. Not everything that happens in rehearsal belongs in the final work.
The director's responsibility is ultimately to the whole: to recognise what is alive, make the necessary choices, and bring all the individual contributions into a coherent piece of storytelling.
Discipline makes play possible.
Trust creates the freedom to play.
Discipline gives that freedom somewhere to go.
CURRENTLY
I’m currently developing new work across theatre, television and film — some of it mine, some of it in collaboration with other writers.
Some projects are still finding their shape. Others are moving towards production.
I like working in that space between an idea and its eventual form: asking what the work wants to become, what it might surprise us with, and what it needs in order to get there.
And I’m looking forward to returning to directing theatre in 2027.
Directing Merrily We Roll Along at Toi Whakaari in 2019
NOTES
Thoughts, observations and fragments about making things.
TASTE
Where my instincts come from — and what years of making things have taught me about recognising the fresh.
PLAY
Why I believe discipline makes play possible, and why the best creative work happens when people feel safe enough to take risks.
THE ROOM
On the strange, temporary community created when writers, actors and other artists come together to make something.
LET'S MAKE SOMETHING INTERESTING.
I'm interested in ambitious stories, good people and the possibility of creating something that neither of us could have done alone.