Information About Ed - Hampstead teacher

Personal Description:

Hello! I have been a professional actor for 15+ years and have worked extensively across both stage and screen. My most notable stage credits include leading roles in 3 West End productions: '12 Angry Men' opposite Martin Shaw, 'Hay Fever' opposite Felicity Kendall, and 'Shakespeare In Love' for which I was directed by Declan Donnellan. Alongside these I was in the original productions of ' Rock' by Simon Stephens at the Lyric Hammersmith and 'Many Moons' by Alice Birch at Theatre503, and have played leading roles at venues including the Gate Theatre, the Birmingham Rep, Leicester Curve, Edinburgh Lyceum, Royal & Derngate, the Oxford Playhouse, the Jermyn Street Theatre, and the Unicorn amongst others.

On **Contact Detail Removed**vision I played the lead roles of Sir Louis Scatcherd in Julian Fellowes’s 'Doctor Thorne' on ITV opposite Tom Hollander and Doc Holliday in Netflix’s 'Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War', as well as roles in 'Vikings:Valhalla' (Netflix), 'The Sandman' (Netflix), 'Informer' (BBC), 'Domina' (Sky), 'Silent Witness' (BBC), 'Being Human' (BBC), and 'Married Single Other' (ITV). On film I appeared in 'Denial' with Rachel Weiss, award-winning short film 'The Brain Hack' (for which I received the Best Actor award at the British Horror Film Festival), and 'Hard, Cracked The Wind' by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Mark Jenkin.

I was also awarded the Spotlight Award for Outstanding Performance for my role in 'Herons' by Simon Stephens and received a First Class Degree in Drama and a 2:1 in English Literature from The University of Manchester.

Teaching Experience:

I am a regular tutor for Junior Lawyers Club where I lead classes in public speaking and debating skills for ages 9-18. JLC is a DofE-approved activity provider and each week I teach groups of no more than 6 children exercises designed to improve their articulacy, mental agility, and confidence.

Additionally, during the pandemic I founded ReadThrough, an online play reading/workshop company that performed and taught GCSE and A Level set texts for school-age children across the country. Overall ReadThrough events reached approximately 45,000 students nationwide, employed innumerable actors and performers (including Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, George MacKay, Jade Anouka, Pearl Mackie, and Joe Lycett), and was featured on ITV News, BBC News, and in The Observer. We led bespoke online workshops for individual school groups analysing and performing extracts from plays on the syllabus, with a particular focus on Shakespeare, and put on 3 large scale performed readings of 'Macbeth', 'Romeo & Juliet', and 'Othello' that were available nationwide and free to all students.

I also occasionally work with play writing undergraduates at Bath Spa University helping them develop and refine their work

Teaching Approach:

My belief is that drama is at its core a collaborative exercise and so my relationship with students should be as collaborative as possible. To do this I try to create a safe and risk-free working environment where no thought or instinct is invalid.

The aim here is to shepherd students towards being able to identify and amplify their innate strengths and give them the confidence to invest in their views and perspectives. I couple this with fostering a rigorous analytical ability that helps them to recognise the potential in a text and to delineate which of their ideas are worth pursuing and which are not. I like to get to know the interests and hobbies of my students to help with this process, and as a working actor I am familiar with the pressures on students and performers and endeavour to alleviate these whilst being honest with students about their aims and how to best achieve them.

Most of all I want it to be relaxed and fun!