One of the fund recipients for 2023 / 2024 was awarded to Oli Hurst, who is the company director for Red Brick theatre company. Red Brick is a group of University of Salford graduates from the Theatre and Performance Practice degree. Red Brick were commissioned through the Salford Advantage fund to direct students and recent graduates in a two-night gig at The New Adelphi Theatre.
Since graduating in 2021, Oli has been working with the Young Vic as a member of their Fresh Directions 2023/24 cohort. As part of this programme, he will be part of the team developing and directing a new play Bad Moult (Winner of the Cambridge Creatives Playwrighting Award) by Robin Cantwell.
In addition to this, Oli is currently Assistant Directing David Thacker in a revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. His recent work also includes the first professional UK revival of Simon Stephens’ Pornography and he’s about to start directing The BBC’s First Homosexual as part of BBC100 celebrations, for a national tour.
The project started with some introductory workshops which allowed students to understand the project, learn about the process; from workshops, auditioning and then rehearsing for the shows. Students had to audition for the performances and received some mock audition training to help ease them into the process.
Once the cast was formed, rehearsals began! Students from Technical Theatre were also included and supported the production, from lighting and sound, so simple set management.
One of the Level 5, Theatre and Performance Practice students, Lucy Ryan, has said, ‘I really enjoyed “Brick by Brick” it was a really useful experience to work with Oli and Tilly. They were both brilliant, I really liked their way of working, such as ‘mining the text’, their dynamic ways of playing with scenes, and their use of fun warmup activities in the workshops. The talks on working in the industry were also really helpful, particularly the tips they offered. This experience was so helpful’.
An unforeseen plus on this project was that we were also working with a 23-24 graduate scholar, and she was able to support the performance as part of her own scholarship project, which is another great way to get our current students thinking about all the opportunities open to them post graduating.
Thank you to alumni, friends, and supporters who made this project possible.