Cotton Grass Theatre Company
About the Company
David has been a co-director of Cotton Grass Theatre since 2001. The company was founded by Susan Daniel in 1995.
Cotton Grass Theatre’s first production was Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills about a tragic day in the life of country children (all played by adults) during the Second World War. The play was staged in the grounds of Birchfield Hall using the spectacular backdrop of Mam Tor and the Pennine foothills.
Next, Bazaar and Rummage by Sue Townsend was staged in a converted barn near Bakewell. Then in 1998 The Hollow Country, a play for young people was set in the underworld of caverns and mines of the Peak District. This was followed the next year by another children’s play: The Glorious Tale of the Golden Whale. Later that year Into the Rose Garden by Caroline Small was set in an art gallery using the work of local painters and is the story of an estranged mother and daughter who re-enact the story of their loss. The play toured again in 2003.
Cotton Grass has produced two more pieces of new writing by Caroline Small - Black Bread and Tired Feet, a family show based on traditional Russian folk tales, and that summer Cotton Grass commissioned Caroline to write Gardens of Delight, an adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. This was an open-air production staged in a picturesque farmyard near Youlgrave. In May 2001 we produced La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler at the Buxton Opera House Studio. and the Crucible Studio in Sheffield. In 2003 we toured locally with The Unreturning Army, a show about Derbyshire Dales and the Great War.
Our autumn 2004 tour was a double bill of two plays by Derbyshire writers. Louise Page, a writer of national reputation for plays at the RSC and the Royal Court, adapted Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Chris Hawes’ Haunted was an adaptation of the ghost stories of M R James. The plays went on a seven week tour of theatres, art centres and village halls. In 2006 we toured Derbyshire schools with Corvus Corax: The Crow in the Know, a new play about creation myths from around the world, written by Susan Daniel. Then Sherlock Holmes and The Final Problem written for us by Justin Webb toured nationally from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford.
This summer Cotton Grass received lottery funding to develop and manage a schools project for Winster Morris Dancers commemorating Cecil Sharp’s 1908 visit to Winster when he recorded the Morris dances of the local lead miners. We produced a new play, A Nest of Singing Birds by David Frederickson telling the story of Sharp’s life and work.
Forthcoming Cotton Grass production - The Unknown Land
