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 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 Mary Rose: A Boat of Ill Repute), a late coming of age for a pensioner who finds herself on holiday on a boat (Finding Libby) and a musical based on Midsummer Milly, a story for children by Dan Clacher.
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
Poet, singer-songwriter and accordion player Heather Wastie has been involved with canals since childhood, when her family took part in campaigns to save them. Her writing projects include a Residency at the Museum of Carpet, culminating in a book published by Black Pear Press. She was the 2015/16 Worcestershire Poet Laureate and in 2017 was commissioned to write and perform poems for the popular Nationwide Building Society television ad campaign. In 2018 she completed a book of poems about the restoration of the Droitwich Canals, The Muck and Shovel Brigade, commissioned by Canal & River Trust for The Ring. This work is now touring as half of Alarum’s double bill, Acts of Abandon, along with Kate’s play The Mary Rose: A Boat of Ill repute.
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 six 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 too lives on a narrowboat and likes to play with motorbikes.
