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Bespoke Theatre for Diverse Communities

The Background & The Journey

Holly Blue Productions have emerged from the work of Teresa Early as Founder and Artistic Director of Theatre Peckham. For the last 30 years, together with Roger Goslyn and Ali MacLaurin, she created innovative theatre for a new community.

The productions that you will find here were made for, by and with diverse groups, reflecting their needs and aspirations.

Explore our history!

To visit all the available plays, please click on PLAYS in the menu bar above

I am a practical theatre maker. Before I ever thought of starting a theatre company, I had spent much time gawping at the footlights and flying systems in the old theatres along the South Coast, and picking brains – asking questions of stage crews and managers.

I had also been producing my own ballets from the age of 13, putting the results on the nearest available stage.

After this, in my early twenties, I started a company called “Balletmakers Ltd” training and opportunities for young choreographers. It was good practice, and launched quite a few choreographers of note, but I was too young to sustain it over many years.

Whatever medium, always theatre inspired me – the way it actively created groups of people, and attracted those with the great mixture of skills necessary to create good theatre. These skills are all also life skills, which makes the medium unusually successful in in the development of previously under privileged inner city areas.

As a resident in Peckham from 1973, Inner cities I knew about. I taught, and worked closely within the community. Wave after wave of immigration created an exciting local mix, part clash, part integration, part a wary co-existence, but always forcing a profound questioning of attitudes and values. This is diversity in every sense of the word.

From all this “Theatre Peckham” was born, home, the North Peckham Estate, known first as Peckham Varieties, then New Peckham Varieties, then the Magic Eye Theatre and finally, as Theatre Peckham.

Education and training must start young, if you are to practice performing arts well. Martial Arts also have a basis in the physical body, which they respectfully train from early youth, but this training is also about ethical and personal development. Theatre arts have a similar path to follow, which includes a key link into the surrounding community – the audience for the performance – but our fledgling education and performance programme had nothing to perform.

Musical Theatre, as a major form uses many art forms, is enjoyed by a broad range of people and is liked by children. The diverse local population was multilingual and had in common a passion for music – it was a good choice for wider communication. I had already begun to work with Roger Goslyn, for many years a member of Jules Holland’s Band. A multi instrumentalist he is, classically trained, but right at home with Jazz, Irish, African, Caribbean and other World Music cultures.

We had already worked together for a year, when we started to write. Soon joined by young designer Ali MacLaurin we started to create work for our new performers. As practised at Theatre Peckham, the work has had a broader intention, which has evolved into a different model for theatre practice. The best way to describe this model now is as Bespoke Theatre, made for by and with any group, reflecting their needs and aspirations and presenting them to audiences which often may not usually, or ever, call themselves theatre goers.

What is Bespoke Theatre?

The shows on this site were written because there was so little performable musical theatre yet written for children to actively perform in as an integral part, which could also reasonably be shown to a public audience of paying customers. Our groups presented particular opportunities to create with new themes across the age range of children, older young people and mixed casts of young and adult professionals. Though this may not be immediately obvious , they do reflect themes and issues current with the groups themselves at the time and are tailored (hence the title ‘bespoke’) and use technical challenges and story content relevant , often to both cast and audience but sometimes this can vary. There now is a wide and glorious literature available to child and teenage readers, but comparatively little theatre and even less of Musical Theatre, hence this sample of Theatre Peckham’s performance work over the years.

What are these cats doing on this website?

This is about Miss Holly Blue. Holly Blue is Teresa’s cat. Here is Holly, with her diverse brothers and sisters and her Mum, Miss Hermione Blue. She’s the very small kitten down right – too small to sell, so Teresa kept her. You can see her big brother in the picture all ready to push her with his enornmous paw. We were looking for a name for this website, and so my friend Stefan B said ‘The name does’t have to make sense. You can call it anything -, “Like ‘Holly Blue.’ So we did. Holly is very friendly with the young singers, and likes to join in when we record songs, but when Teresa sings, she’s very concerned. She thinks Teresa is yowling because she’s in pain, so she runs to jump on her lap, with head butts, cat kisses and purrs. She has now owned Teresa for seventeen years, so at seventeen she is a mere teenager. They are very happy together.