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The Production Exchange presents
Lady Anna: All At Sea
Playwright | Craig Baxter
Director | Colin Blumenau
Designer | Libby Watson
Playwright | Craig Baxter
Craig’s work includes St James and the Tattoo Man, Taking Liberties, The Animals, Monogamy, Big Bang, Relics, Spearcarriers, Hard Sell, The Ministry of Pleasure, Re: Design, Somniloquy, Let Newton Be!, and adaptations of The Man Who Walked Through Walls, The Snow Queen and The CV of Aurora Ortiz. His play The Altruists won the 4th Stage Script Competition for plays about science or technology.
Director | Colin Blumenau
Colin had an early freelance career as an actor working in television, on stage and on the radio. He is probably best remembered for playing PC ‘Taffy’ Edwards in The Bill. Over the last 25 years he has been Artistic Director of three different regional theatres, latterly as Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds which he left in 2012 to resume a freelance career as director and writer.
Coming from the Regency Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds he has developed a depth of specialism in the 18th and early 19th century English Drama repertoire. He has directed Black Eyed Susan, Wives as they Were and Maids as They Are, Animal Magnetism, He’s Much to Blame, The Poor Solder, The Massacre and The London Merchant. Colin also pioneered the Restoring the Repertoire programme and has directed some 40 rehearsed readings of rediscovered 18th and 19th Century plays.
Other selected credits include: Othello, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, The Tempest, The Misanthrope, Relatively Speaking and Dangerous Corner. He has also directed some ten Pantomimes for the Theatre Royal. His critically acclaimed current production of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park touring nationally during 2012 and 2013.
As a Director Colin has also been happy to spread his wings into the field of Opera. In 2009 he was invited to direct the international co-production of Purcell/Dryden’s King Arthur for a tour of Europe’s historic theatres.
His other directing work has ranged across the entire repertoire from Pantomime to the Classics and he has also found the time to direct work for other organisations including the Bouncers for Theatre Royal and Opera House in Wakefield, Jack and the Beanstalk for the Pomegranate Theatre in Chesterfield, two Pantomimes for The Riverfront, Newport, RADA, Mountview Academy, Oxford School of Drama and The Junction in Cambridge.
Colin is also the Artistic Director of The Production Exchange a new charitable initiative set up with the express purposes of giving support to creative talent and mentoring emergent producing expertise. The company’s producers have undertaken a number of projects in the first eighteen months of its existence – The School for Scandal (Red Handed Theatre Company at The Park Theatre), Emily– The Making of a Militant Suffragette (Cambridge Devised Theatre –National Tour), The Pearl (RADA Studios), War (Arts Theatre) and Bombers Moon (Engine House in association with the Park Theatre).
Using the pseudonym of Daniel O’Brien he has also written a number of works for the theatre including ten Pantomimes, adaptations of Three Men in a Boat and Cider with Rosie, original plays Double Indignity and Dick Turpin’s Last Ride and a recent adaptation of Fielding’s The Coffee House Politician into a new musical called The Incorruptibles. He has just finished writing a new musical The Lighthouse. His TV work includes episodes of The Bill and Trainer. He is also a freelance journalist.