Welcome to our new website.  Have a look at the productions we will be touring in the next few months.

We have just completed a tour of a new play, Thin Air by Berlie Doherty, inspired by the haunting landscape and mythology of the Peak District and specially written for Cotton Grass Theatre.  The show played in theatres and arts centres nationally - and local Derbyshire venues like Thornbridge Hall at Ashford-in-the-Water.  The show was directed by writer and director Joyce Branagh.  

In support of Help for Heroes
www.helpforheroes.org.uk

Berlie lives in the Peak District and began writing while teaching and working in radio. She has written more than 60 books for children, as well as for the theatre, radio and television. Her work is published all over the world, and many of her books have been televised. Berlie has won the Carnegie Medal twice for Granny Was a Buffer Girl and for Dear Nobody. She has also won the Writer's Guild Children's Fiction Award for Daughter of the Sea and her stage adaptation of Dear Nobody. Her opera libretto Wild Cat for WNO won the Royal Philharmonic Society award for music in education.  Cotton Grass Theatre recently completed a tour of an adaptation of her book Street Child about the boy who inspired Dr Barnardo. 

Joyce is a writer and director who lives in the north-west.  She has directed productions at the Bristol Old Vic, the Theatre Royal Harrogate, Cork Opera House, the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, the Oldham Coliseum and was Literary Director of the Watford Palace Theatre.  Her writing includes Dick Whittington and Jack and the Beanstalk for the Palace Theatre Watford, Peggy and The Spaceman and Sheepish for Manchester's 24:7 theatre festival and For The Record for Forest Forge Theatre Co.

Cotton Grass Theatre began producing professional theatre in the Peak District in 1995. Our first production was Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills about a tragic day in the life of country children (all played by adults) during the Second World War. The play was staged in the grounds of Birchfield Hall at Hathersage using the spectacular backdrop of Mam Tor.

Bazaar and Rummage by Sue Townsend was staged in a converted barn near Bakewell. Then in 1998 The Hollow Country, a play for young people was set in the underworld of caverns and mines of the Peak District. We followed this with another children’s play: The Glorious Tale of the Golden Whale.  Next Into the Rose Garden by Caroline Small was set in an art gallery, using the work of local artists, and is the story of an estranged mother and daughter who re-enact the story of their loss. The play toured again in 2003. 

Cotton Grass Theatre went on to produce two more pieces of new writing by Caroline Small: Black Bread and Tired Feet, a family show based on traditional Russian folk tales, and Gardens of Delight, an adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. This was staged in a picturesque farmyard near Youlgrave.

In May 2001 we produced La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler at the Buxton Opera House Studio. and the Crucible Studio in Sheffield.  In 2003 we toured Derbyshire with The Unreturning Army, a show about Derbyshire Dales and the Great War. Our autumn 2004 tour was a double bill of two plays by Derbyshire writers.  Louise Page, a writer of national reputation for plays at the RSC and the Royal Court, adapted Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler and Chris Hawes’ Haunted was an adaptation of the ghost stories of M R James.  The plays toured theatres, art centres and village halls.  In 2006 we toured with a play for Key Stage 2: Corvus Corax: The Crow in the Know, a new play about creation myths from around the world, written by Susan Daniel. Then Sherlock Holmes and The Final Problem written for us by Justin Webb, toured nationally from the Maltings Arts Centre  in Berwick-on-Tweed  to the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford.

In 2008 Cotton Grass received lottery funding to develop and manage a schools project for Winster Morris Dancers recreating Cecil Sharp’s 1908 visit to Winster when he recorded the Morris dances of the local lead miners. We worked in three local schools, providing workshops on folksong and dance and produced a new play, A Nest of Singing Birds, written by David Frederickson, telling the story of Sharp’s life and work.

In 2009-10 we toured with The Unknown Land by Caroline Small, a play for one actor and many characters telling the story of a journey to the Arctic in 1844, of one man's battle against extreme conditions and the ghosts in his own mind. We also toured again with Haunted, Chris Hawes' adaptation of the creepy stories of M R James.

Last summer we completed a short run of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in the grounds of Thornbridge Hall at Ashford-in-the-Water, as part of this year's Bakewell Arts Festival.  One audience member emailed:   'it really was a cracker and we've talked about it such a lot, there was so much love and joy and poetry in that play last night.....it was astonishing - as we were leaving all the people were full of it, so delighted.'

Then in the autumn we toured with a new stage adaptation of Street Child by Berlie Doherty about the boy who inspired Dr Barnardo.  The production used puppets and projected images (with artwork by Daisy Frossard) and toured to theatres, arts centres, village halls, tourist attractions and schools across the country.
 

Susan has worked professionally in the theatre since 1984. She began her career in fringe and street theatre, juggling and fire-eating. She has also worked in TV, radio, corporate video and was a puppeteer in the children’s TV show, Button Moon.  She is founder and artistic director of Cotton Grass Theatre and has produced and appeared in nearly all its productions. Susan both wrote and appeared in Cotton Grass Theatre's play for children, Corvus Corax: The Crow in the Know. On TV recently Sue has been seen in Emmerdale.   Susan has just played Maria in Cotton Grass Theatre's production of Twelfth Night at Thornbridge Hall, Ashford-in-the-Water.  Last autumn she toured in the stage adaptation of Street Child by Berlie Doherty.

David has appeared at the RSC, Birmingham Rep, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Manchester Royal Exchange. He made his West End debut in Nigel Planer’s On the Ceiling at the Garrick Theatre in 2005. More recently, he played Polonius in Hamlet for Demi-Paradise Productions in Lancaster. TV work includes: Dangerfield, The Braithwaites, Emmerdale, Heartbeat, The Cops and The Royal Today. For Cotton Grass: Black Bread and Tired Feet, The Unreturning Army, The Compleat Angler, Haunted and Sherlock Holmes and the Final Problem, in which he played Watson, Moriarty and Conan Doyle.  In 2009-10 he toured in The Unknown Land by Caroline Small, a play for one actor and a musician, about the fatal attraction of the polar regions. Most recently, Last summer he played Malvolio in Cotton Grass Theatre's  Twelfth Night at Thornbridge Hall.

Cotton Grass Theatre, 2 Overdale, The Hills, Bradwell, Derbyshire, S33 9GZ
Telephone and Fax: 01433 621624

Email:
Sue: cottongrass@hotmail.co.uk
David: mail@davidfrederickson.com