So let’s get to the excitement at hand! Come December 12th, your ‘audio retelling of Dickens’ classic winter ghost story’ will launch online. Although we still believe that a director-esque figure can still be useful to finalise ideas and almost have an outside eye on the work.

You can also build on your collaborators ideas and it just progresses from there. If you’re workingfrom one mind constantly you only have one person’s vision, by working collaboratively you sometimes find things from your collaborators that you might not have even thought of. The most rewarding element is getting a slice of everyone’s ideas and creativity. What we love about theatre is the collaboration the seeing other people’s perspective and not getting your own way and using everyone’s experience to make the work.ĮH: As a company we have been working collaboratively since our first project at York. That’s how you arrive at work that is truly unique and human and fully-rounded.If it’s just one person’s vision, then I think you might as well just write a book or something. The whole point of collaboration is disagreement and conflict and compromise and balance. Everyone is invited to participate in the creativity if they want to: designers, stage managers, producers, performers… We try and have the whole development process as transparent as possible. Same goes for the director, the director is not the production, nor the performers or dramaturgs or whoever. So we love and respect the text, but the text is not the production what happens in the live moment is the production. MJ: Right from the start, we’ve been intentional about attempting to dismantle the hierarchies that we find in some theatre practice. Many companies are now rejecting ideas of authority in theatre-making, instead loudly declaring their affinity with a collaborative force and Rocket Box seems to sit happily in that category – what do you think it is that makes heavily collaborative theatre-making so rewarding? I think we’ve all learnt through covid times how communication is key to our culture as human beings, and this is something we strive to replicate in how we work together in a non-hierarchical setting and continue to tell stories. Due to the significant distance we all have between each other, we must communicate clearly and truthfully with one another. I think this adds to the way that we have to actively communicate with each other as a group of theatremakers. Empathy for and connection with our audiences in the live moment is our vision.ĮH: Although we all met while studying in York, we’re actually based all over the UK (from Buxton to London to Cornwall and even sometimes Tenerife). At our heart, we’re a storytelling company who works collaboratively. We’re excited to get back to live audiences with Many Moons at the Pleasance in Islington in the New Year. We were touring that show nationally all through this year, until the UK went into lockdown, so we started making work remotely and for remote audiences. MJ: We met at the University of York, and won the 2019 York Performance Award with our production of Alice Birch’s Many Moons. So tell me a little bit about your company Rocket Box Theatre – how did it all begin and what’s the vision? With their radio play launching online come December 12th, I caught up with Director Eleanor Hibbert and writer Mischa Jones to get the inside track on this ambitious company and their adaptation of Dickens’ most famous tale… Make no mistake about it, offering up a new rendition of the eminent Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol is no tame feat… But it’s exactly what Rocket Box Theatre are offering online audiences this December: a fresh, richly layered audio adaptation of the tale beloved by many.

Adding music to rocketbox