So we promised you a series of exciting announcements over the coming year as each of our new productions is revealed separately.  And here's the first - Raw Material:  Llareggub Revisited will be an extraordinary new take on Under Milk Wood, inhabiting Dylan Thomas's town of Laugharne for a weekend to deconstruct and reconstruct the classic text, in a joyful collision with the characters of today.  Created by artist Marc Rees (who turned the seaside town of…

I’m sitting snuggled in a booth in the Spiegeltent we’ve imported from Belgium into the grounds of Cardiff Castle watching the last ever rehearsal for Silly Kings before the final preview of the show tonight.  It’s a wonderful end to the year – with preview…

Earlier this year I was invited to Deakin University in Melbourne to…

In the summer of 1988, as a young directing student at Columbia University, New York, I was sent on a placement at a downtown experimental theatre company I’d never heard of. Swiftly assigned to floor sweeping and other ASM duties, it was impressed on me by everyone I met that I was fortunate to be working for one of the most significant arts groups in the city, and that the best thing that I could do would be to keep my head down, learn what I could, and never get involved in the personal…

The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning is going very well up in Edinburgh, but I'm now back in Cardiff for a few days. Usually as a director this involves a strong feeling of separation anxiety as you hand a show over to cast and production team. However, with this production, since every show is live-cast, I can keep an eye on things wherever I am! This is probably a nightmare scenario for the poor actors, in terms of never being free from director's notes, but live-casting is certainly…

After a day of rehearsals for The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, a day focussed on the details of props and costumes, ins and outs, we settled down around a laptop at 6pm this evening to hear the verdict being announced in Bradley's case. Ironically in a case about information freedom and state secrets, there are many restrictions on press access to the military courtroom, and in the end it's via the twitter feeds of the heroic journalists who have tracked and championed this case from…

The pic here is of a beautiful mural-fountain-staircase-thang commemorating the fact that in 1893 New Zealand was the first country to give the right to vote to all women.  When I first visited New Zealand in the early 2000s it had its first female Prime Minister – the Labor party’s Helen Clarke – who (unlike the UK’s first female Prime Minister) also appointed a…

I’m sitting in Auckland airport staring out across the runway to a stunning bay surrounded lurking volcanic-looking mountains.  It’s a beautiful place, and I’ve had a very fine week here, talking about NTW’s work and meeting a range of artists, companies and festivals.  I was invited by Creative New Zealand (the equivalent here of Arts Council Wales) to talk about our work at their annual conference. People here seem excited by what we’ve been doing in Wales and keen to hear more about…

Praxis Makes Perfect will soon be appearing again in its festival incarnations at Latitude and Number 6 Festivals, and it's wonderful to be reminded of that bank holiday weekend in May when a corner of Carfdiff became a branch of a worldwide revolutionary movement and declared that 'Reading is Resistance'.  A number of people have been in touch since then to ask for the recipe for our infamous Champagne Socialist cocktail (it's a secret I'm afraid!) and also to ask about the marvellous folk…

Here's the new video from the I Am Bradley Manning Campaign.  You can add your own contribution to the campaign by taking a photo with an 'I Am Bradley Manning' sign and posting it on the I Am Bradley Manning website.

The casting of our production The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning - where all of…

Today is the final day of work for our legendary Executive Producer Lucy Davies before she heads off to her new role at London's Royal Court.  Streams of people have been coming through our offices to say goodbye, and there will be a lot more well-wishing and happy reminiscing tonight. Lucy produced 24 shows in the first three years of NTW, as well as providing inspiring leadership and support to a huge range of people.  Her ability to help artists reach their very best work, to…

Here’s a picture of the theatre space yesterday – as the designers and crew worked to construct our ‘in the round’ set, with 360˚ video projection.  It’s the first time the space has been used this way at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, so everyone is very excited to see the set go in.  The design team is really top quality, full of great ideas and a strong drive…

I’m writing this on the Toyoko Line train to Motomachi-Chukagai, where I’m heading to see an interesting-sounding performance by Chiten company at the Kanagawa Arts Theatre.  It’s my day off and I’ve decided to do a theatre splurge – I spend four and a half hours this afternoon at the National Noh Theatre.  There the highlight was probably a half hour long dance by a…

At the centre of The Opportunity of Efficiency is the character Ken Lomax – a business consultant who measures the effectiveness and efficiency of companies’ processes and makes recommendations for re-structuring (usually involving a lot of people getting sacked).  The method Ken uses to assess a business’s ways of working is called ‘the brown paper exercise’.  This…

It was interesting to read Lyn Gardner’s blog in The Guardian today on community theatre and how we judge it, inspired partly by the fact that, sadly, she had not enjoyed NTW’s recent production De Gabay at all.

Her main question was whether we should judge…

Here's the cast for The Opportunity of Efficiency - from left to right, Haruka Shibuya (playing Jennifer Field), Kosuke Toyohare (Ken Lomax), Shu Nakajima (Mr Grant), Reiko Tajima (Mrs Grant), Yuko Miyamoto (Iffy Scott) and Yusei Tajima (no relation to Reiko, playing Jasper Hardy).  In the pic, everyone's at a cast meal celebrating completion of the first week of rehearsals,…

I arrived in Tokyo on Tuesday evening, and now it's Thursday night.  So far I've had two days or rehearsal for The Opportunity of Efficiency, one production meeting and a meet and greet. I've been to another play at the theatre, searched for a SIM card (no joy) and eaten a plenty of rice and skewered chicken but no sushi.   No photos yet, I'm afraid - will try and sort that out (but I have managed a few shaky vine videos - shared on Twitter).  I'm staying in the Hatagaya neighbourhood, just…

After a series of truly thrilling 'Artist* of the Day' visits by our six shortlisted artists for NTW Artist* of the Year 2013 the entire staff team at NTW had several days of intense discussion as to which of these amazing people…

This Monday at 6pm is the Wales Roadshow for the Artangel Open - an call for extraordinary ideas from artists, with £1million and the unique expertise of Artangel at the disposal of the winners!

Come along to the NTW warehouse on Dumballs Road to find out all…

One of the things that we wanted to make sure of when we set up NTW was that, despite having a very small staff team,  there were roles at the core of the company for people at all stages of their creative lives.  With this in mind two of the first roles we ever appointed at NTW (just after me and Lucy) were our Creative Associates - two year positions at the heart of NTW for theatre practitioners who had a track record of exciting work, but were still at relatively early stages in their…