Photo credit: Fred Seddon
Directing
I direct shows that can split open cruxes of difficult-to-reach emotion and strive to arrive at a place of hope. My work centres mis/communication and I'm often searching for ways to stage the interior world. I've also worked on poetry-based theatre, and I understand the work that words do, no matter how few or how many of them there are. Above all, paying attention is at the heart of my practice.
Image credit: Matt Coleclough
Unmade - Georgina Dettmer
Directed for Paper Moon, work-in-progress commissioned by Offbeat Festival
Charting a love story across the years, this unmade bedroom is home to immaterial hauntings through time. Capturing a mother and her daughter, their love stories, their goodbyes, and their tender quiet moments emanate from this immersive set which you will find yourself in. Move inside the bedroom, unmade.
Ask these questions with us:
Does love look different at different moments in time?
How do our objects make us?
How does a space change and do we change with it?
Home Fires - Maya Little
Directed for Paper Moon
"They used to say I had your voice on the phone. But that can't be true. Not really. They just didn't listen closely enough."
Sometimes you know you should talk to someone, but it's so much easier in your head. In the wake of her father's death, Marie imagines speaking to her estranged mother, playing out the conversation in her head. Amidst false starts and dead ends, she pleads for resolution.
A piece of new writing about families, inheritance, and broken connections.
REVIEWS:
'Writer and director Maya Little has created something at once intimate and engaging, with beautifully crafted language and a powerful use of silence.' - Cherwell
'Blazing The Standard For Student Theatre' - Oxford Blue
Stranger, Baby – Emily Berry, adapted by Maya Little
Directed for Semblance Productions
"Strange love for the living, strange love for the dead."
A riveting play on the themes of mothers and daughters, love and loss, and the sense of a splitting self. Based on the award-winning collection of poems by Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby portrays a daughter's grief over losing her mother and the accompanying crumbling sense of self hood in the isolation of her bereavement. The drama and intensity of our internal lives and often unspoken struggles is brought to life, through this authentic and compelling original adaptation by Maya Little.
REVIEWS:
‘remarkable… affecting… striking' - 4* Cherwell
‘A dramatization of poems may initially seem like an excessively cerebral project, but Stranger, Baby is the opposite of that: it is a plunge into real, unadulterated emotion in its frank and conflicting form.' – Oxford Opening Night
Colosseum – Jacob Forward, adapted by Maya Little
Directed for Oxford New Writing Festival
“They will open you at dawn. Gouged. Gashed. Gutted. For all the greedy eyes to see." Shadowy figures surround a waiting gladiator, watching him, murmuring his story. Through the night he half-dreams and half-remembers, deep in the underbelly of the Colosseum. But the terrible dawn must break. Written in verse, this eerie play will grip you and refuse to let go.
Yellow – Charlotte Perkins Gilman, adapted by Conky Kampfner
Assistant directed with Squidink Theatre
"I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back"
Charlotte is not your typical freelance writer. With a knife-sharp wit, a wild edge and a love of all things gothic, she thrills everyone she meets. But the walls begin to draw in once Charlotte discovers she may be pregnant, as she increasingly finds herself the victim rather than the author of her very own horror story.
REVIEWS:
'a stunning modern adaptation' - Oxford Opening Night
'Yellow is an innovative reimagining of a classic text; tearing away the modern perception of changed attitudes towards female mental health to draw thought-provoking parallels between Gilman's time and our own.' - Oxford Student