With an award winning 20 year track record Feelgood Theatre Productions are one of the most innovative and dynamic companies in the UK today.
Feelgood’s mission is to make theatre with a definite sense of risk and adventure. Founded by Artistic Director Caroline Clegg in 1994 they have distinguished themselves with an array of classics and ground-breaking new commissions following their spectacular launch with their site specific musical Our Girls, where the audience lined the runway at Barton Aerodrome and looked on in awe as a World War II bomber landed to disembark the cast. Follow that! Well, they have:
Robin Hood – The Legend (Clegg): Blue Remembered Hills (Potter), Pictures At An Exhibition (Mussorgsky), La Boheme (Puccini), Wind in the Willows (Bennett), The Wizard of Oz, (L F Baum) Crystal Clear (Young), Romeo & Juliet - Thando & Ruvhengo, Zimbabwe/UK (Shakespeare) with Ndebele and Shona adaptations. Rosa (Watkins) The Three Musketeers (Dumas/OByrne) Dracula - The Blood Count (Clifford) Arthur - King of the Britons (Clifford/Clegg) Not About Heroes (MacDonald) Macbeth (Shakespeare) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) and Slave – A Question of Freedom (Fegan/Clegg)
Feelgood’s unique shows fuse the unusual with the imaginative; new or traditional text with acappella singing, native language and drumming; Shakespeare with African dance, abseiling, pyrotechnics and fire sculpting with music and drama - in parks, cliff tops, garden centres, African townships, museums and traditional theatres, including the West End. Feelgood has won critical acclaim and many awards including the Manchester Evening News Award; The Horniman Award for ‘outstanding services to live theatre’, and was honoured with a Lord Mayors Civic Reception on their 10th anniversary and presented to HRH the Queen and HRH Duke of Edinburgh at the official opening of The Lowry for which Feelgood produced the inaugural show Crystal Clear.
They have also received the Angel Award for Artistic Excellence, The City Life Award for Best Production, Best Director and the Pete Postlethwaite Best New Play award for Slave – A Question of Freedom which also won the first Human Trafficking Foundation Media Award presented at No 10 Downing Street. Slave – A Question of Freedom tells the heartrending true story of Mende Nazer a young girl from the remote Nuba Mountains in Sudan who was abducted during the civil war, enslaved and then trafficked to the UK in 2000. She now lives in freedom. Slave was performed on tour and in the House of Lords with Mende present.
Eloquent Protest - Review 2009
"...The Trafalgar Studios’ stage is scaled down by plain black curtains, and the
black floor simply decorated with scarlet paper poppy leaves, giving the studio an intimate feel of a small fringe production, rather than of its West End glitz…
If anyone had said an event about world wars would be entertaining and in fact
laugh-out-loud funny at times, you might find it hard to believe. But it isn’t as serious
an event as you might think, with humour - as well as heartbreaking stories of everyday life during the Blitz, including one so sad it doesn’t bear repeating.
This is an event for all those of us, myself included, born in the late 20th century onwards, who might pin a poppy on every November in no more than a polite gesture of good citizenship. The event could so easily have been melodramatic and depressing, but instead was uplifting and positive. It provoked not the easy emotion of show business, but real tears of real loss.”
Aleks Sierz, TheatreVoice - 4 Stars
Committed to peace and dialogue for conflict resolution Feelgood created Eloquent Protest; an artist’s response to war. An annual event for peace held on Remembrance Sunday in Trafalgar Studios and then The Duke of York’s Theatre from 2006 – 2009. Artists for Peace produced the Manchester event in 2010 directed by Hazel Roy, co-producer of Feelgood's Eloquent Protest events.
Eloquent Protest fuses music, poetry and drama – an artist’s response to the price of war, which honours the fallen and counts the cost of their sacrifice. Each year since 2006 this unique event has grown and we are indebted to our host and inspiration Tony Benn who along with Roy Bailey led performers and speakers including: Janie Dee, Roy Bailey, Charlie Dore, Stella Duffy, Johnnie Fiori, David Harsent, Jason Isaacs, Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus, Nasrin Parvaz, Lemn Sissay, Peter Straker, Samuel West, Jane Milligan, Loveday Smith, Julian Littman, Fiona McDonald, Robert Powell, Clive Rowe.
Read more here > http://feelgoodtheatre.co.uk/index.php?/site/eloquent_protest/