New for 2025, go beyond the play and dive deeper into the world behind each of our productions with our Saturday Seminars series.
Enjoy guest lectures and discussions with leading academics and experts to explore the history and context behind each of our productions.
Previous speakers include Dr Will Tosh and Jonathan Dimbleby.
All tickets £15.
Actresses and Playwrights: Creative Collaborations with Professor Gilli Bush-Bailey
Actresses as whores? The actress as muse? Gilli will explore how early women in theatre have been described, and consider others ways of looking back, or forward. How were new plays shaped to reflect the women who performed them? How many successful playwrights of the day do we remember now?
Joining Gilli to bring the texts to life will be Playhouse Creatures actors Zoe Brough (Harry Potter and The Cursed Child) and Nicole Sawyerr (My Mother’s Funeral: The Show).
The event will be chaired by OT Artistic Director Tom Littler who, in addition to directing, teaches Restoration and 18th Century Literature at the University of Cambridge.
Gilli began her career as a child actress aged twelve, appearing first as Phyllis in BBC’s The Railway Children (1967). She trained at Arts Educational (London), but left school at fifteen to make the televised film series Here Come the Double Deckers (1970), then went on to more acting work in television and theatre, including the Orange Tree’s production of The Queen of Spades & I.
Her academic career started later, first as a mature student at Kingston University, then at Royal Holloway. She remained there as a lecturer, teaching theatre and performance history in undergraduate courses on Restoration Theatre, West End and Commercial Theatre, Melodrama, and Comedy, reviving and revising the stories of women and performance practice from 1660 right up to contemporary stand-up performance. Later, as Head of Department, she led the project build of the Caryl Churchill Theatre, a flexible performance space that reflects something of the Restoration indoor theatres.
Publications include: Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late Stuart Stage (Manchester University Press) and Performing Herself: Autobiography & Fanny Kelly’s Dramatic Recollections (Manchester University Press). Alongside Maggie B. Gale, she edited Plays and Performance Texts by British and American Women from the Modernist Period 1880-1930 (Manchester University Press). Her most recent publication arose from a transatlantic collaboration with Kate Flaherty at Australian National University, with whom she curated the collection of essays Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850-1960 (Routledge).
Saturday Seminar Upcoming Dates
Sat 10 May • 11am Ben and Imo
Sat 14 Jun • 11am In Praise of Love