My time as KIT's Trainee Director

I’ve always enjoyed old-school industrial units. The more old-school the better. Opening lifts with metal diamond shaped shutter doors that you pull across, the hum of its machinery, the thud at the top. Then the fluorescent strip lighting, rows of identical doors, the musty smell - there’s a solitude to these places that I adore. As a teenager I worked in a warehouse like this, loading and unpacking vans full of folded trestle tables and tubs of waffle mixture. When I went to drama school to become a serious artist, I thought my rickety industrial lift days were behind me: a small loss for a greater gain. But little did I know that in January 2025 I would become Trainee Director at KIT Theatre, and a regular visitor of KIT’s prop storage unit.

As lovely as they are, trips to the props store are a small percentage of what I’ve done over the last 9 months. I’ve also directed, script-edited, performed, facilitated, rehearsed, emailed, zoomed, spreadsheeted, observed, shadowed, minuted, shovelled, evaluated, coded, interviewed, excavated, birdwatched, and much much more. It's such a joy to get to do a job with such variety. I’ve learnt loads about what I didn’t know I was good at (formatting scripts) and a bit about things I thought I would be a lot better at (using the office nespresso machines). 

I’ve gained foundational skills that will shape the rest of my career, and my confidence has skyrocketed. I cannot thank my amazing colleagues, Tom, Eleanor and Kat enough. They have taught me so much, been constantly encouraging, and there has been no question too big or small that I’ve been able to ask them - but the most transformational aspect of their support has been their trust. This hasn’t been a trainee role where I just watch and learn - I’ve had genuine responsibility. If the scripts, props, or schedules don’t get where they need to be, the project doesn’t happen. This combination of trust and support has resulted in huge growth in my ability as an artist and a worker.

I joined KIT as a freelance actor-facilitator in 2021, and it's been one of my favourite places to work since. The first KIT adventure I worked on was The Promise, a project in which students celebrate their local park and fight back against gentrification. It was so much fun to play Richard Stark, a Scrooge-like character who has his world-view completely flipped when the children introduce him to the beauty of nature. I was blown away by the quality of the piece, its ethics, and KIT’s attention to detail. 

Some work for young people I’ve been involved with has felt like a box-ticking exercise but KIT’s work is professional standard, and the impact is humungous. I have no doubt some of the young people we work with will remember KIT’s projects when they are adults, asking themselves: did an alien really hatch out of an egg behind the wendy house in our playground? Did we really dig up dinosaur fossils in the school field? Did we really help a sentient robot escape from their overbearing creator through the power of coding and dance? Yes, yes and yes!

Everyone at KIT, from our incredible freelancers to the brilliant board to the core team, cares deeply about what we do. We want to instill in the young people we work with that they have the power to change people’s minds, that they can advocate for what they think is important, and that they are the experts and heroes in their own adventures. 

In June, I spent a Friday afternoon on the Classbot 450 project, a co-production with Potential Difference. I was sitting in an arts and crafts classroom which we had repurposed into a secret laboratory for the week. Agatha Quango, a visionary but ruthless inventor, was sitting on a video call with her creation LeX, the world's first robot teacher, and the call was being broadcast to every class in the school via Zoom. The students had spent the week getting to know LeX, helping them to understand the world as they became a sentient being. But Agatha had learnt of LeX’s ‘malfunctions’ and arrived at the school to shut LeX down. With the help of the students, LeX had managed to escape to Paddington station and was now confronting Agatha via this video call, pleading to be allowed to live as a free being.

It was a hot day, so many of the classrooms, including the one we were in, had their windows open. I watched in-person, along with all the students on the screens in their classrooms, as Agatha changed her mind and agreed to let LeX live. They’d done it! They’d won! One by one, with a slight delay as the Zoom connection caught up with each class, screams of joy and celebration erupted around us, spilling from open windows and racing down the corridors. The energy created in that moment could have powered their whole postcode. And that’s what KIT does, it creates little eruptions of joy and loveliness wherever it goes. What a pleasure it is to be a part of that.