KATE SAFFIN
Boater, writer, storyteller and actor, Kate Saffin has lived on a narrowboat and told stories of the waterways as solo plays since 1999. She trained as a writer for stage and broadcast media at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (MFA).
She adapted the waterway classic Ramlin Rose; the Boatwoman’s story by the late Sheila Stewart and has performed at canal festivals, in pub gardens and at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Other canal based plays have retold the apparently true story of a brothel on a boat (The Boat of Ill Repute) and a late coming of age for a pensioner who finds herself on holiday on a boat (Finding Libby).
Fringe Review on Finding Libby, 2013
“Kate Saffin’s performance is naturalistic, painfully funny, poised and thoroughly on top of the material”
The Scotsman, 2005
“SKILFULLY adapted from Sheila Stewart’s novel, Ramlin Rose, this excellent one-woman show tells the tale of Rose, a boatwoman on the Oxford canal… Kate Saffin is utterly convincing in the role of Rose… and manages the Talking Heads-style 40-minute monologue authoritatively.”
The Stage 2010
“Through clever and sensitive … editing, Kate Saffin converts Shakespeare’s Richard III into the monologue of an imagined house servant, played with warm, realistic humour by Helen McGregor.”
HEATHER WASTIE
Heather Wastie’s first experience of canals was as a child when her family was involved in campaigns to save them. Her father, Alan T Smith, owned ex-working boat Laurel, and was awarded an MBE for his services to inland waterways.
Heather was Worcestershire Poet Laureate 2015/16 and is well known for her interpretations of oral history. In 2013 she was Writer in Residence at the Museum of Carpet, turning people’s memories into poems, monologues and songs which she now performs. This work was published in November 2015 by Black Pear Press under the title Weaving Yarns. In 2017 she was commissioned by Worcestershire Building Preservation Trust to compose a children’s song cycle, Loom in the Loft, to celebrate the restoration of the Weavers’ Cottages in Kidderminster.
In 2017 she was commissioned to write and perform poems for the popular Nationwide Building Society ad campaign, Voices Nationwide. She has also worked as poet and actor for National Trust property Croome Court in Worcestershire.
You can see more of Heather’s work at http://www.wastiesspace.co.uk
London City Nights, 27/4/17
“Heather Wastie… vividly, brings to life the sounds, smells, and texture of waterway life.”
Audience review of Idle Women and Judies
“Wonderful performance full of knowledge and very entertaining.”
ZOE HUNN
Freelance tour and production manager
Zoe has been managing professional touring theatre productions for over 4 years, and has intermittently worked as a technician, photographer, stage manager, production manager, pyrotechnician, lighting designer, MC, set builder and as a performer over the last 14 years, touring the UK and over 20 countries internationally. She lives on a traditional narrowboat on the Stort and likes to play with motorbikes.
