Inkwell Productions
Theatre Production Company · Operations Director & Musical Director · 2016–2020
I joined Inkwell Productions in 2016 as a composer, writing music and sound for theatre. It was my first sustained professional composition role, and over the next few years my involvement gradually grew into rehearsals, production and the wider running of the company, eventually becoming Operations Director and a member of the board.
The company worked across classic, contemporary and new writing, with productions presented in Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge, Birmingham and London. Inkwell closed in 2020 during the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Writing for Theatre
Composing for plays pushed me towards literature in a way I had not expected.
I found myself reading more widely because I wanted to understand the characters, context and dramatic world of the work I was writing for. The music made more sense to me when it came from a fuller understanding of the text, rather than simply responding to the mood of a scene.
For Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, I worked with a range of sources from instruments to electronic
soundscaping to create different atmospheres across the production, alongside recurring musical ideas connected to particular characters.
That period changed the way I thought about composing for existing work. I became increasingly interested in writing from within the world of a piece, rather than placing music around it afterwards.
Growing into the Company
My role eventually stretched far beyond composition.
As Operations Director, I was involved in the practical and strategic running of the company: financial planning, production budgets, rehearsals, scheduling, venues, events, travel, resources and performer welfare.
I worked alongside the Creative Director on productions and contributed at board level to programming, future projects, business decisions and scouting possible locations for new work.
The scale of the job could change from one day to the next. I might be preparing music for a production, helping run a rehearsal, working through finances, arranging the practicalities of an event or dealing with whatever problem had appeared before the next performance.
There was something quite formative about that mixture. Creative ideas still had to survive contact with budgets, deadlines, people, spaces and practical reality, and I became used to moving between those different parts of the work rather than seeing them as completely separate jobs.
Looking Back
Inkwell was messy, ambitious and, at times, slightly terrifying. I was young, learning a lot of it by doing it, and certainly did not always feel as though I knew what I was doing.
That is also part of why I remember it so fondly.
It was where I first experienced creative work as something genuinely collective: writers, actors, directors, musicians and producers relying on one another to turn an idea into something that could actually meet an audience. It taught me an enormous amount about responsibility, organisation and collaboration, but also about being willing to learn while the work is happening.
I can still see that period in the practice I have now.
Much of what I do continues to sit somewhere between making the work, working with people and creating the conditions that allow the work to happen — and I suspect that relationship will continue developing for as long as I am making things.
