woman in black creative team
Robin herford — director
Robin read Philosophy and English at the University of St Andrews, and trained as an actor at the BristolOld Vic Theatre School.Much of Robin’s early career was involved with Sir Alan Ayckbourn, and the Stephen Joseph Theatre inScarborough, first as an actor, then as Associate Director and finally a stint as Artistic Director. He hasappeared in the original production of more Ayckbourn plays than any other actor, including theenormous 16 play two-hander INTIMATE EXCHANGES, performing both in Scarborough and the WestEnd. He is often asked to direct Alan’s plays, and has notched up over 30 productions of them, both inthe UK and abroad.His most successful production started life in Scarborough. THE WOMAN IN BLACK, which hecommissioned and directed in 1987, has been running in London for over thirty years, and hascompleted 12 UK tours. Directing, and occasionally performing in this play, has taken him, among otherplaces, to Japan, USA, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia andNew Zealand.He now directs much more than he acts, varying his choice of play and venue as much as possible. Thelast two productions he directed were STRAY DOGS, a new play about Stalin and the Russian poet AnnaAkhmatova at the Park Theatre in London,and a new version of THE WOMAN IN BLACK at McKittrick’sHotel in New York, where it won Best Revival in the Off-Broadway Alliance Awards.
susan hill — author
Susan Hill was born in Scarborough and educated at grammar schools there and in Coventry, andtook herEnglish degree at King’s College London. Her best-known books, apart from The Woman in Black, are the novels I’m the King ofthe Castle, Strange Meeting and In the Springtime of the Year. Her books have won the Whitbread Fiction Award, the SomersetMaugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She has also written non-fictionand children’s books, and been a regular reviewer of books for numerous national newspapers and journals and broadcastregularly. Her most recent books are a trilogy of crime novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler: The VariousHaunts of Men, The Pure in Heart and The Risk of Darkness. The series has been bought for television adaptation. Susan Hilllives in a farmhouse in rural Gloucestershire from where she runs her own small publishing company, Long Barn Books. She ismarried to the Shakespeare scholar SirStanley Wells and has two adult daughters. Of her fiction, Susan Hill writes: “I was bornon the north-east coast of Yorkshire, in the beautiful town of Scarborough, in a snowbound February during the Second WorldWar. There were a good many old ladies living there in those days but there never seemed to be any children near to us, so thatI spent a lot of my time on my own. But quite contentedly so. I had imaginary friends and I made up stories about them. Assoon as I could, I wrote them down. So there was never a time in my life when I was not a writer. And so it has gone on. Atschool, between work for Oand A levels, I wrote two novels, which were published when I was at university reading English.They were very bad novels, my apprentice work, and they are out of print-but they were the best I could do at the time. It tookme some years to find my realvoice, and meanwhile, I lived from hand to mouth as a freelance book reviewer, and always, Iread, not just the new books, but the things I had grown up with-Dickens, Hardy, the Brontës, everything with atmosphere anda sense of place.” Susan Hill was awarded a CBE in the 2012 Queen’s birthday and diamond jubilee honours. www.susan-hill.com
Anshuman bhatia — lighting designer
His design’s for Opera, Theater, and Dance have been seen at Santa Fe Opera, Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts, Dublin’s Civic Theater, Soho Rep, The Public, The Atlantic, Arena Stage in Washington D.C., The Park Avenue Armory, Bard Music Festival, WP Theater, The Juilliard School, Madison Opera, Kentucky Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Classic Stage Company, HERE Arts Center, LoftOpera, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Keen Company, Pacific Symphony, Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Virginia Arts Festival, Rattlestick Theater, The Sheen Center, Troy’s EMPAC. M.F.A. NYU. www.bhatiadesign.com
sebastian Frost — sound designer
Theatre designs include:The Last Ship (UK andUSA tours),170 Days in Nanjing (NanjingOpera), Memoirs of a Sailor (Kuwait), Kiss Me Kate (WNO), Jekyll & Hyde (Old Vic),AnInspector Calls (UK, US tour),White Christmas, Annie, AChristmas Carol (Leeds Playhouse),Calamity Jane (Watermill & UK Tour),The Witches (Curve),If Only (Chichester), The Lion, TheWitch & The Wardrobe (Kensington Gardens),Decade (Headlong), Antony & Cleopatra(Chichester),Little Shop Of Horrors (Birmingham), The Magic Flute (Duke of York’s), TheCommon Pursuit, Take Flight, Total Eclipse (Menier), Trainspotting (UKtour), Tonight’s TheNight (Victoria Palace), Boy Band (Gielgud), Kat And The Kings (London,Cort, Cape Town),Summer Begins (Donmar),and Fame (UK Tour).Other work includesimmersive sounddesignsfor Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek,Madame Tussaud’s, theQueen’sGoldenJubilee celebrations, and Sebastian is the designer for the Royal EdinburghMilitary Tattoo.In 2008, he received the first ever Best Sound Design of a Musical TonyAward nomination for Sunday in the Parkwith George on Broadway.
michael holt — scenic designer
An established and successful designer for drama, opera and ballet Michael hascollaborated with leading arts companies around the world. He has been associated with playwright Alan Ayckbournat the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough for over 40 years where his numerous designs for this author/directorinclude Way Upstream, Man of the Moment and the much praised Othello with Michael Gambon. Michael has longassociations with repertory companies and independent producers across the UK. West End credits include the long-running West End success The Woman in Black; Absurd Person Singular, Whitehall Theatre; The Glory of theGarden, Duke of York’s Theatre; Rough Justice, Apollo Theatre and JuneMoon, Vaudeville Theatre. Internationalcredits include productions in New York, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore and Norway and Austria.Opera productions include collaborations with the Royal Opera House, Copenhagen; the Avignon Festival,France;the Knokke Opera Festival, Belgium and The Brisbane Festival, Australia. He has written numerous books on stagedesign and critical survey of the plays of Alan Ayckbourn