After a fantastic first week in the rehearsal room with Katie Mitchell and her highly skilled collaborators I am extremely pleased to announce that I have been offered a contract to remain out in Aix for the remainder of these rehearsals as one of the assistant directors. 
I will be travelling back for Sweeney Todd rehearsals on the weekends but during the week I'll be out in the south of France working on this new production of Ariadne auf Naxos. I feel very grateful to have been offered this opportunity and am looking forward to the coming busy weeks.  

After travelling across the UK for the past few weeks rehearsing Sweeney Todd it's time to venture further south as I'll be in rehearsals this week for an opera at Aix en Provence. I'm back in Katie Mitchell's rehearsal room for another production this year of Ariadne auf Naxos - a show I know well already, but I'm especially looking forward to diving further into the reality and psychology of some of these characters that appear larger than life and like caricatures. This is the approach I've taken with Sweeney Todd as well - and I'm much more interested in viewing these characters as real humans with difficulties and conflicts rather than the conventional 'bad' characters they are perceived as usually. Philip Zimbardo writes about his Lucifer Theory which looks at how society can be a 'bad' barrel corrupting the 'apples' within it - rather than any of the apples being born bad per se. I find it much more satisfying to create stories and characters without judgement or assumption but in this way that promotes discovery instead.