Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i Ink Pellet

“We are very proud of Samson. He’s a local playwright who has been working dramaturgically with Jesse Jones for three years to develop this play”, says Anna Simpson, Schools and Young People’s Associate at Royal and Derngate. Top Gs Like Me is directed by Jesse, who is Royal and Derngate’s artistic director. The production asks big questions of the online space and how it influences young minds, and will see the Derngate auditorium transformed into a replica skatepark. At a time when the national conversation turns more and more to how we understand and protect our children online, the theatre is staging the production with an ambition that thousands of young people will see it, with specific initiatives to target the student population. Through the associated activities on offer, education…

A selection of courses, CPD training, auditions, exhibitions and forthcoming productions. To be included in future issues, please email john@inkpellet.co.uk The deadline for the next issue is January 8th 2026 PANTO SEASON AND FESTIVE SHOWS RED Chickenshed Theatre Chase Side, Southgate, London N14 4PE 25th November 2025 - 10th January 2026 RED is a magical twist on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood - where the familiar turns unexpected, and nothing is quite what it seems. www.chickenshed.org.uk/events/red PUSS IN BOOTS Theatre Royal Winchester Sat 29 Nov 2025 - Sun 04 Jan 2026 Get ready for the purrr-fect swashbuckling Christmas adventure. Full of PAW-some gags, original songs and loads of audience participation, it’s going to be MEOW-gic! www.theatreroyalwinchester.co.uk/whats-on/puss-boots PUNCHDRUNK ENRICHMENT’S FIRESIDE TALES 6 Dec - 4 Jan, Punchdrunk Enrichment Stores,…

“My wonderful co-writer and co-director Tonderai Munyevu and I were determined to make this a bespoke panto for this part of London’s East End,” says Vikki Stone. She is talking to me in a corridor outside the rehearsal room for Mama Goose, which runs from 21 November to 03 January in the iconic theatre where Joan Littlewood once presided and broke moulds. “So our Mama lives in Stratford and we have the excellent Duane Gooden to play her. The African inspired costumes he will wear are truly fabulous. Then there’s Che Walker as Gary the Goose and every inch an East End “geezer”. The show is firmly rooted in Stratford and celebrates all the neighbourhood’s glorious diversity”, says Vikki. This is, though, an unusual panto in more ways than one.…

Have you always been interested in theatre? Yes. I went to ballet school when I was 10. It was a toss up between that and drama school really. Afterwards I worked in publishing for a while – so there’s the writing link – and later did teacher training at Royal Academy of Music. I taught ballet for 22 years. But I had never really got writing out of my system. I remembered recently how I used to make little books and comics when I was a child. So you started writing? I did an MPhil in playwriting. And of course, I assumed I’d go straight into the National Theatre and sent them my play. Inevitably I was very quickly disabused of my illusions although they were kind and said gently that…

Dipo was born in Hackney, but his family returned to Nigeria when he was nine. “So I did all my secondary schooling – including school plays – and my first degree in Nigeria”, he says, recalling a childhood studded with enthusiastic reading. “My father had a good library and I read all sorts of fiction: A Tale of Two Cities, Jaws, and a lot of Sherlock Holmes and Ian Fleming, for instance. Somehow I bypassed the pulp fiction stage and didn’t get to it until much later, although I like it now.” The future writer was emerging too. “I wrote comic books for which my brother did the drawing, then some illustrated short stories which were mostly fantasy,” says Dipo, who went on to University of Benin to do a…

If you tell people you work in, or are involved with, theatre, expect an immediate assumption that you mean the West End or one of the big theatres in, say Manchester or Birmingham. In fact, of course the industry is like a massive iceberg. Yes London’s Palace Theatre or Newcastle’s Theatre Royal are spectacular and prominent, but for every one of those there are a probably a dozen other smaller theatres, companies or organisations producing interesting smallscale work on low budgets, typically without any external funding from anywhere. We call it Fringe Theatre, but in a sense it’s the big commercial theatre which are the fringe because they’re in the minority. My trusty Collins Dictionary defines “fringe” as “an outer edge or periphery” which, given the prohibitive cost of tickets,…