David Frederickson Biography
In a previous life David has been a probation officer and a Sheffield City
Councillor. After a severe mid-life crisis he trained as an actor at the
Bristol Old Vic in 1991.
He spent two seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company appearing in Gale
Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew, Sir Peter Hall's Julius Caesar
and Steven Pimlott’s Richard III. He produced the RSC Fringe Festival
that year (The Other Place and the Young Vic) and appeared in Arthur Miller's
A Memory of Two Mondays.
There followed appearances at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, in Alan Bennett’s
Single Spies, Manchester Royal Exchange (The Candidate), the Jill Freud company
at Southwold (Sailor Beware and Hindle Wakes) the Birmingham Rep (The Atheist’s
Tragedy and Julius Caesar) and Channel Theatre (A Warning to the Curious).
He is a director of Cotton Grass Theatre, a rural touring company in the
Derbyshire Peak District where he lives. For Cotton Grass Theatre he has
appeared in Black Bread and Tired Feet, a reworking of the Russian Baboushka
stories, dramatised by Caroline Small. He also played all five male roles
in Schnitzler’s La Ronde at the Sheffield Crucible Studio and toured
in his own war poetry show, The Unreturning Army, about the Derbyshire Peak
District and the First World War. More recently he played Dr Watson, Arthur
Conan Doyle and Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Final Problem, written
for Cotton Grass Theatre by Justin Webb, and toured in Alan Bennett’s
A Chip in the Sugar.
He has also appeared as Malvolio in an out-door production of Twelfth Night
for Creation Theatre in Oxford and Canterbury; Scrooge in a one-man version
of A Christmas Carol and Dr Miranda in Death and the Maiden, both at the
Buxton Opera House.
In 2005 he toured nationally with David Haig in My Boy Jack (about Rudyard
Kipling) and produced and appeared in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler,
adapted for Cotton Grass Theatre by Louise Page, and Haunted, a dramatisation
of the ghost stories of M R James. The plays toured village halls and art
centres ending with a run at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford.
He made his West End debut playing Pope Julius II in Nigel Planer’s
On The Ceiling with Ron Cook and Ralf Little, which opened at the Birmingham
Rep then went to the Garrick Theatre.
This year he has played Polonius in Hamlet for Demi-Paradise Productions
at Lancaster Castle. Next year he will tour nationally in his own show, The
Unknown Land, written by Caroline Small. It will be a collaboration with
professional folk singer Keith Kendrick from Ashbourne. His own play, A Nest
of Singing Birds, about the folk song collector Cecil Sharp, was written
for this summer’s centenary of Sharp’s visit to Winster. It will
be revived by Cotton Grass Theatre for the BBC Derby Folk Festival next October.
He made his film debut in 2002 in The Third Wave, a Swedish police thriller,
with Nicholas Farrell and John Benfield. His TV credits include Kinsey, Dangerfield,
Heartbeat, Cops, Emmerdale, The Royal Today and The Braithwaites. He also
has considerable radio and voiceover experience.
David Frederickson CV
