After years in filmmaking, I am taking a new direction as a playwright, to tell stories through theatre, the art form I have loved all my life. My passions continue to be small lives caught up in the great sweep of history, finding positive stories in a world of pain, and entertaining audiences at the same time as making them think.

My work has been performed in London at the Arcola, Baron’s Court and Cockpit theatres, at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, and at The Garage and Sainsbury Arts Centre in Norwich.

I am delighted to have been selected for the London Playwrights Workshop Writer Development Programme 2023-24.                                                                                                                   In 2022 I received an MA in Scriptwriting from the University of East Anglia.

I am currently developing Adelina, a play with opera music about Queen Victoria’s favourite soprano, who fought her way out of an abusive marriage in an age when divorce was not allowed, risking career and reputation to be with the man she loved. She took refuge from the global scandal in Wales where she spent the last forty years of her life.

I secured Arts Council of Wales in 2020 funding to work in partnership with Theatr Brycheiniog in Brecon, and develop Adelina. The project was forced to finish early because of the pandemic. Nevertheless, good work was done with a talented group of Welsh theatre professionals led by director Erica Eirian. Click here for details.

 

Deborah has been an avid theatre and opera fan all her life. At university she acted and directed plays for London University Drama Society, including Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the medieval miracle play Mankind and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale.  She took two modern productions to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where she was the first person to hire the building that has now become the Pleasance Theatre.