About

The Telling attempts to break new ground, where new writing by Artistic Director Clare Norburn and music collide. We tour high-quality, accessible and affordable productions: combining engagements by leading promoters with self-promotions in places that are often missed out on touring circuits, including building audiences and partnerships in Wolverhampton, South Cumbria, Conwy (North Wales), Bedford and Folkestone.

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Our creative team is led by Artistic Director Clare Norburn (playwright & producer and soon-to-be retired soprano) who won the 2023 Colin Skipp Memorial Radio Playwriting Competition and was one of 7 writers, selected out of 400, for BBC/ACE-funded The Space’s Pitch Perfect scheme to receive mentoring and be commissioned to develop a play with music for national BBC radio.

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Our regular acclaimed director Nicholas Renton cut his teeth in theatre, going on to direct at the RSC and then spent 30 years directing for the BBC and ITV, including being BAFTA-nominated for BBC TV’s Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. Our lighting designer is Natalie Rowland.

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We work with a creative pool of: 

• leading actors including Alex Newman, Rachael Stirling, Danny Webb, Dominic Marsh, Clive Hayward, Karen Ascoe, Molly Lynch, Robin Soans, Gerald Kyd, Suzanne Ahmet, Teresa Banham, Leila Mimmack and Niall Ashdown 

• acclaimed musicians, many who are early music specialists, including Emily Baines, Jean Kelly, Jamie Akers, Clemmie Franks, Heloise Bernard, Giles Lewin, Alison Kinder, Avital Raz and Maya Levy

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In 2024, The Telling won the prestigious Audience Participation of the Year Award organised by the European Early Music organisation, REMA for our Songs and Stories project in partnership with animateur Sarah Atter and Wolverhampton Refugee and Migrant Centre. In 2022, The Telling was shortlisted for two other REMA Awards.

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We have performed for a range of venues and promoters including, Buxton International Music Festival, Music at Oxford, Anvil Arts, Lake District Summer Music, Newbury Spring Festival, Beverley Early Music Festival, Brighton Early Music Festival, Arena Theatre (Wolves), Conwy Classical Music Festival, Stoke Newington Early Music Festival, Little Missenden Festival, Keele Concerts Society, Bedford Music Club, Music in the Village (Walthamstow), Stranraer Music For All, New Vic Theatre. We usually tour for one night but in 2024, we are performing our first week-run at OSO Arts Centre, Barnes, with follow up runs planned there for 2025.

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The Telling’s programmes are written by Clare Norburn whose latter work takes inspiration from Brecht, often tearing down the fourth wall, and iconoclastic TV playwright, Dennis Potter, exploring the nexus between memory and characters’ inner or fantasy lives and harnessing music’s unique capacity to trigger memories and feelings. Several are political or provide commentary on current issues seen through the lens of the past. For example, celebrity culture and #MeToo are explored in What the Dickens? and Into the Melting Pot focuses on religious and cultural intolerance and the plight of refugees.

 

​​“Clare Norburn takes moments in history to make us understand the present more clearly” Robin Soans, playwright​

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Our most recent show, What the Dickens? (2023) reimagines Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol as Dickens himself is “haunted” by his wife and mother of his ten children, Catherine Dickens, and his secret young mistress, Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan. All seven performers sing, act and play instruments – sometimes all at the same time!

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★★★★★ "a hauntingly brilliant exploration... masterfully intertwines fiction and reality... a powerful and thought-provoking piece of theatre" Estelle Luck, Pink Prince Theatre on What the Dickens?, 2024

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The Telling led the way in delivering online workshops during the pandemic as well as singing and playing public workshops, sometimes enabling participants to join us on stage at some point during the evening.

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“I found myself in tears as I realised it was the first time in many years I'd actually been able to sing a carol” Online Singing Workshop participant

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Since 2023, we have worked with animateur Sarah Atter in developing music education projects for schools and refugee organisations in areas we tour, which take inspiration from our stage works.

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From 2020 to 2022, we made arthouse film adaptions of our Empowered Women Trilogy shows which received critical praise. Most notably, Vision, which follows the extraordinary medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen played by Teresa Banham (RSC/Shared Experience), was selected by The Guardian’s Tim Ashley as one of the Top 3 online summer music highlights alongside the Salzburg and Edinburgh Festivals:

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“Norburn and mezzo Ariane Prüssner are mesmerising in the music” Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 2020

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Also during lockdown, we created Love in the Lockdown (2021). Starring Alec Newman and Rachael Stirling, it is a distinctive online play with music, directed, rehearsed and filmed entirely over Zoom or on the performers’ phones in their own homes. It attracted significant press interest and was reviewed favourably in comparison with BBC TV’s Staged with David Tennant and Michael Sheen. It was shortlisted in 6 categories for the SceneSaver Awards at which Nicholas Renton won Best Director.

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"an exploration of the boundaries between art & life ... intelligent … does more than reflect overfamiliar pandemic situations back at us ... it finds new terrain" Arifa Akbar, The Guardian on Love in the Lockdown (2021)

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The Telling records for First Hand Records: our first CD Gardens of Delight was selected for BBC Music Magazine’s playlist for April 2019 and our second CD Secret Life of Carols reached No 25 in the Classical Charts in December 2019. David Mellor (Classic FM/Daily Mail) called it his "absolute favourite" 2019 Christmas Album and it was in The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine, The Daily Mail and Classic FM's “Best Christmas Albums” lists.

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"imaginative and eclectic" Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian on Secret Life of Carols CD

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Our most recent CD consists of the soundtracks of the Vision and Unsung Heroine concertplays, released in 2022 in memory of mezzo, Ariane Prüssner, and received a four-star review from BBC Music Magazine.​​​