Kneehigh theatre

Kneehigh were a band of brave storytellers that made theatre and took risks. Artist-led it took the conditions of creativity seriously. It had a sense of family, looked to challenge and entertain, and balanced freedom of expression with rigorous craft.

From their home near St Austell, Kneehigh built a reputation for creating vigorous and popular theatre for audiences throughout the UK and beyond. In Cornwall, 1980, a village school teacher began to run theatre workshops in his spare time. In due course a mixture of people became involved, a farmer, the sign writer from Tesco, several students, a thrash guitarist from a local band, an electrician. No actors…nobody who had been trained. The workshops took place in the spirit of cheerful anarchy and casually slipped into performance, and finally the production of shows.

“We created theatre for families in locations within their communities, village halls, marquees, harbour sides…and less conventional places. We created theatre on cliff-tops, in preaching pits and quarries, amongst gunpowder works and arsenic wastes, up trees, down holes, where the river meets the sea and where woodland footpaths end.”