Northern Stage opportunity for budding director

Published: 15 June 2021
Reporter: Peter Lathan

The JMK Trust
The Victoria Wood Foundation

The JMK Trust, supported by the Victoria Wood Foundation, is offering a bursary at Northern Stage for an associate director to work with Maria Crocker on her production of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, opening November 2021. Maria Crocker was herself the first recipient of a JMK assistant director bursary at Northern Stage in 2014, and is one of the Director Practitioners running JMK's National Programme. She is a Headlong Origins associate artist and runner up for the Sir Peter Hall RTST Directors Award 2019.

Her work in theatre as director includes Assassins at Mountview, Little Bits of Light (workshop) at National Theatre Studio / ARC Stockton, Pronoun at ALRA, Growth at Northern Stage, Brian Looks Like Alan Rickman at York Theatre Royal Studio and Found at Alnwick Playhouse. Her work as associate director includes Local Hero for The Edinburgh Lyceum, Hadestown for The National Theatre, Meek for Headlong and Birmingham Rep, Gods Are Fallen and All Safety Gone for Greyscale (International tour) and The Gamblers for Greyscale and Dundee Rep.

“I'm thrilled to be working with a JMK associate director on this magical Christmas production in my home town of Newcastle,” Maria Crocker said. “The JMK has played a big part in my directing journey to this point, and I know first-hand how important these opportunities are for directors, particularly those wanting to work on a larger scale outside of London.”

The JMK Trust was founded in memory of James Menzies-Kitchin, a young director of great promise who died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 28, to give opportunities to theatre directors of similar ability and vision. Each year it gives one prestigious award to enable an outstanding applicant aged 35 or under to create their own production of their choice of text. Its intensive development and selection process has itself given powerful impetus to the best theatre practitioners of the future. Previous winners have become major players in British theatre, including Thea Sharrock, Orla O'Loughlin, Bijan Sheibani, Joe Hill-Gibbins, Natalie Abrahami, Roy Alexander Weise and Polly Findlay.

The expanding National Directors Programme, working in partnership with 14 regional theatres, is a network seeking talent from across the UK, which feeds into the JMK Award and enables a national reach. The programme at each partner venue is run by the JMK's Director Practitioners who are established, locally-based directors. They curate the programme for their region, working with their nearest partner venues to tailor the work to the needs of local directors providing year-round training, mentoring, bursaries and support for directors of all ages.

Northern Stage is the North East JMK Partner.

Full details about how to apply for the bursary are on the JMK web site.

In addition, the Trustees of the JMK Trust today launched a 6-month mentoring scheme for 24 theatre directors around the country funded by the Noël Coward Foundation. As the industry returns to life, this gives access to monthly one-to-one sessions with a mentor and the opportunity to meet and work with fellow mentees. This aims to build a cohort of peers and a supportive learning opportunity for directors as we emerge from the pandemic and the devastating impact it has had on the theatre industry. The mentors are directors Nik Partridge, Piers Black, Atri Banerjee and Nel Crouch.

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