Posts by inkycloakhq

Winning for everyone

Michelle Payne is an award-winning working-class playwright, director and actor from Essex, who is determined to help more under-represented creatives access all areas of the theatre world. A lifelong Dagenham and Redbridge FC fan, Michelle staged her most recent show about a women’s football team, Squad Goals, in the team’s Victoria Road stadium and is now developing it for TV. When she led an Inside Out session with our younger participants this summer, she shared a wide range of writing tools that we’ve all been using ever since. What was your entry point into theatre?I had a really good GCSE

Changing the atmosphere in the room

Inky Cloak happened to see the very first performance of an extract from Kamaal Hussain’s show Becoming Scheherazade at a scratch night in Limehouse Town Hall five years ago. What Kamaal shared after just two days’ rehearsal was already a compelling interweaving of his own family’s story, including his Iraqi father’s exile from Baghdad in the 1960s, with the Sinbad stories from The Arabian Nights. (He later took the full show to Edinburgh and on tour.) So we were really happy when he was able to lead one of this summer’s Inside Out digital drama workshops with our younger participants,

LGBTQ+ youth tell their stories

We spent a beautiful Saturday morning a couple of weeks back delivering a pilot workshop for a digital drama group for young LGBTQ+ people (aged 18 to 27). The participants were so creative, so supportive of each other, and so committed to the work. Guided by the tasks we suggested, they came up with ideas for shows rooted in their own experience that we would rush to see. Really. They were all that good. The pilot was the last part of the project we ran last year with the help of a Covid-19 emergency grant from Arts Council England (ACE).

Let us introduce you to: Kevin O’Neill

During lockdown we started Inside Out, a weekly digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people. We share stories, play improv games, identify lessons from work by queer dramatists, write about our experiences and hone our performance skills. We asked Kevin O’Neill about his experience of Inside Out and how he’s stayed creative during lockdown. If you’d like to see the work we’ve created in the last few months, don’t miss our digital show, We Were Seized by the Spirit of Love on Thursday 10 December at 8pm. Click here to book your tickets. What has been your favourite part of

Evolving the way we tell our stories with Enby Jupiter

Queer trans disabled artist Enby Jupiter was in the final stages of rehearsing a solo show about sex work at Camden People’s Theatre in March this year when stages across the country went dark at the beginning of the pandemic. Originally programmed as part of the theatre’s annual Sprint festival of wild new work by early-career artists, From My Bedroom uses the framework of a cam show to explore Enby’s experience of being an online sex worker. Enby, who goes by Jay when he’s offstage, originally investigated online sex work when he was looking into possible part-time jobs to support

Let us introduce you to: Jane Liddell-King

During lockdown we started Inside Out, a weekly digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people. We share stories, play improv games, identify lessons from work by queer dramatists, write about our experiences and hone our performance skills. We asked Jane Liddell-King about her experience of Inside Out and how she’s stayed creative during lockdown. If you’d like to see the work we’ve created in the last few months, don’t miss our digital show, We Were Seized by the Spirit of Love on Thursday 10 December at 8pm. Click here to book your tickets. What has been your favourite part of drama club? Listening to

Let us introduce you to: Linda Haggerstone

During lockdown we started Inside Out, a weekly digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people. We share stories, play improv games, identify lessons from work by queer dramatists, write about our experiences and hone our performance skills. We asked Linda Haggerstone about her experience of Inside Out and how she’s stayed creative during lockdown. If you’d like to see the work we’ve created in the last few months, don’t miss our digital show, We Were Seized by the Spirit of Love on Thursday 10 December at 8pm. Click here to book your tickets. What has been your favourite part of

Outside, looking in

Veteran gay activist Ted Brown, who came out before LGBT people had any rights in the UK, has dedicated his life to combating racism and homophobia since joining the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1970, after meeting a group of activists picketing The Boys in the Band in London’s West End. Ted Brown had been aware of his feelings for other boys at school when he was 11 or 12, but it was the discovery of a Tom of Finland book in a Popular Books store in New Cross, London, when he was 15 that convinced him this was not a phase. “I

Answering the call of the dancefloor

He was playing Donna Summer records at his sister’s house parties when he was still at primary school, won a DJ contest when he was still a teenager in Italy, and has been spinning at Horse Meat Disco for more than a decade. Who better to DJ our preview party than Severino Panzetta? From the moment we started organising the preview night for We Raise Our Hands In The Sanctuary at The Albany this summer, our first choice to DJ the after-party was Severino Panzetta, the languidly approachable resident at Horse Meat Disco, the south London gay night that no less an authority than legendary

The thump of the music, like some powerful creature barely contained

Steve Swindells, the club promoter, musician, photographer and all-round creative, reflects on how he put together the pioneering and inclusive LGBT club The Lift in the 1980s, and helped inspire gay novelist Alan Hollinghurst. Tracking queer spaces of the past can be tricky when there is so little trace left in the present – even when the past in question is the relatively recent 1980s, the era in which we have set our new show, We Raise Our Hands In The Sanctuary. The wrecking ball has demolished the bricks and mortar of many spaces, change of ownership or wholesale refurbishment has