Jonathan Holloway (playwright)

Jonathan Holloway (born 1955 in Dulwich, South London) is an English theatre director and playwright. Jonathan Holloway became a prominent figure (as director and founder of two professional companies) in British fringe and touring theatre in the 1980s and 1990s. His work has won three consecutive Edinburgh Fringe First awards (1987, 1988, 1989), the Shakespeare prize at Chile's World Festival of Theatre (1993) and in 2013 his BBC version of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four won a First Prize at the Prix Italia.

For the American historian, see Jonathan Holloway (historian).

At 16, a chance opportunity had taken him to the Edinburgh Fringe as part of the Oxford University Players; a group with whom he had no formal association but who needed a competent actor at very short notice.

Holloway served two years (2012–2014) on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Participants' Council. He has traveled to South America to lead EU sponsored workshops, was an elected member of the Board of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Advisory Panel of the National Campaign for the Arts, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2005 he was made an Honorary Fellow of St Mary's University, Twickenham.

He is regularly invited to talk about his work in universities and colleges, and has travelled to America, S America and the Far East to do so. Broadcasting includes guest appearances on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read and sharing the bill with artist Grayson Perry on a feature about the Arthur Mee Children's Encyclopaedia.

Early career

Holloway graduated in 1977 and went to work at London's Royal Court Theatre, initially as technical manager of its studio space, The Theatre Upstairs. After a few months he also became an Assistant Director working in the Main House, and directed his own production in the Theatre Upstairs. In the summer of 1978 Holloway left the Royal Court and began touring as a performer with the community arts outfit, Free form Arts Trust Ltd. After a year of performing in shows Holloway left, took a temporary teaching job and started a new theatre company with a group of like-minded artists. This was The East End Theatre group based at Chat's Palace Arts Centre in Homerton, E London.

Mature career

In 1982 Holloway (in collaboration with designer Charlotte Humpston) founded a group called 'Red Shift Theatre Company'. Beginning as a shoestring outfit (initially considered by Almeida Theatre founder Pierre Audi to become his resident company), Red Shift was built into a national and international touring company which soon became both artistically influential and a linchpin of UK national touring provision. Holloway has directed all but one of Red Shift's over 50 shows and has written the lion's share of the company's work. By 2009 Red Shift had given over 3000 performances; sold over 250000 tickets; driven 50000 miles; flown 35000 miles; earned approx £2.5m in subsidy from Arts Council England and at least as much again from Box Office income.

. Holloway's freelance directing has included The Playboy of the Western World in Ireland, Le Misanthrope in Boston, USA and advising on the 2008 Gifford's Circus show Caravan - the production which reinvented that company and initiated its current run of successful picaresque productions.

In Sept 2007 Holloway withdrew Red Shift from Arts Council RFO status to pursue new styles of theatre making. He was briefly Head of Performing Arts at Middlesex University and has taught at Brooklands Technical College (Weybridge), St Mary's University College, Royal Holloway University of London, was Artist in Residence at Central School of Speech and Drama and Artistic Associate at Kingston University. He also developed a series of crowd embedded open air performances at festivals, working under the title 'The Invisible Show'. His back catalogue is presented by other theatre producers with increasing frequency.

In 2017 he began writing and directiong a series of ambitious site specific shows for Oxford's Creation Theatre company including 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' at the Mathematics Institute, 'Brave New World' in a ground-breaking hi-tech version using projection screens and binaural wi-fi headphones in the new Westgate Shopping Centre and in 2019 a re-imagining of Don Quixote in the Covered Market.

As a playwright

Scripts for Red Shift include The Double, In The Image of the Beast (Edinburgh Fringe First, 1987), The Hammer (also recorded for BBC Radio 3), Death in Venice, Crime And Punishment (also produced in Chile), Les Misérables (pub. Samuel French, recently in rep in Hong Kong), The Aspern Papers, Nosferatu The Visitor, Nicholas Nickleby, The Man Who Was Thursday, the first stage versions of The Third Man, Get Carter, and Vertigo. His freelance theatre writing includes Darkness Falls for the Palace Theatre Watford, Because It's There (2000), Angels Among The Trees (2004) And A Sensible World (2005), all for Nottingham Playhouse.

Holloway has also written and directed many plays for BBC Radio, including adaptations of Citizen Kane, Strangers and Brothers, and Brave New World, the TV series The Man From Uncle, stories by George Eliot, Willa Cather, Walter de la Mare, Evelyn Waugh, Heinrich Boll, Leo Tolstoy and Andrew Motion, as well as Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy, Goethe's Faust and Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. He has written radio plays celebrating the George Orwell centenary, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death and the Arthur Miller Centenary. [1]

References
  1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?filter=programmes&q=jonathan+holloway
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