Theatre
Production management, sound design, and the occasional time on stage
Theatre is where I learned operations the hard way: live, in front of an audience, with no second takes.
I spent my university years at Bedlam Theatre, the Edinburgh University Theatre Company’s venue, doing everything from acting and sound design to production management. I programmed and ran Bedlam’s Edinburgh Fringe venue — 23 shows in a season, a Front of House team of 7, and a £50,000 budget — and deputy-managed venues for theSpaceUK during the Fringe.
Professionally, I work as a freelance sound designer, including Mary: A Gig Theatre Show across multiple venues and Fringe seasons.
Theatre also drives some of my software: a soundboard for improv comedy shows, the administration system that runs Bedlam’s day-to-day, and a conversational AI for discovering Edinburgh Fringe shows. Those live in the Systems & Automation area, but they exist because theatre kept handing me problems worth solving.
Projects in this area
All projects →
Professional Theatre
Freelance sound design, including "Mary: A Gig Theatre Show" across five runs from the Fringe to the Traverse
Fringe Venue Management
Programming, front of house, and production management for Edinburgh Fringe venues — including leading Bedlam Theatre's return to the Fringe
Edinburgh Festivals Chat
Chatbot providing information about the Edinburgh Festivals, helping you decide which of >4000 shows to see
ImpAmp 3
Web soundboard used live in improv comedy shows — an early experiment in building real software with AI agents
Student Theatre
30+ productions and festivals as production manager, director, producer, and designer — plus two years leading the Edinburgh University Theatre Company
Black Lightning
Maintainer of the Rails application that runs Bedlam Theatre
Photo from “Mary: A Gig Theatre Show”. Credit: Carla Watson
I work as a freelance sound designer and general organiser in theatre. See also the theatre I did as a student.
Theatre
- Mary: A Gig Theatre Show: Sound Designer
- 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: Edinburgh Fringe (August 2024)
Running a venue at the Edinburgh Fringe is operations at its most concentrated: hundreds of performances, companies changing over in minutes, and an audience that doesn’t care that your tech desk just broke.
I’ve run Fringe venues from several seats:
- Bedlam Fringe 2023 — Front of House Manager & Programmer. I led the strategic planning for Bedlam Theatre’s return as a Fringe venue after the pandemic, including setting up the management structure and allocating the £50,000 budget. I programmed and liaised with 23 shows from multiple countries for the 90-seat theatre, and recruited, trained, and led a Front of House team of 7.
- Bedlam Fringe 2024 — Front of House Manager. Back for a second season running Front of House and Box Office operations, and developing the procedures the team runs on.
- Bedlam Fringe 2026 — Production Manager. Currently production-managing the venue’s upcoming Fringe season.
- theSpaceUK 2022 — Deputy Venue Manager. Co-ran the Triplex’s 130-seat and 65-seat spaces for four weeks: a team of 10 technicians and Front of House staff, and around 22 companies a day, changing over every week.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme lists around 3,500 shows. Nobody reads it cover to cover, which means most people pick from the handful of shows with the biggest marketing budgets. I was frustrated enough by this to build the tool I wanted: a chat interface where you describe what you’re in the mood for and get recommendations from the full programme.
Under the hood it’s a RAG pipeline: semantic search over the festival data with ChromaDB vector storage, category filtering, and a FastAPI backend serving a React/TypeScript frontend.
Improv comedy needs sound effects now — a technician fumbling through folders kills the joke. ImpAmp is Bedlam Theatre’s purpose-built soundboard for live improv: multiple soundbanks, instant search, armed tracks, multiple sounds per pad, and Google Drive sync so each show’s sounds follow the team.
This third version was also a deliberate experiment in AI-driven development: I built it in Next.js using Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5, back when letting agents write most of the code was still a novelty. It has been running real shows since.
During university (and a little after), student theatre was my second degree: over thirty productions and festivals as production manager, producer, director, technician, composer, and actor. As President and Business Manager of the Edinburgh University Theatre Company — the student company that fully operates the Bedlam Theatre — I helped reopen the theatre after the covid-19 pandemic and led its return as an Edinburgh Fringe venue in 2023.
Shows marked * took place in the Bedlam Theatre
Festivals
- Paradok Platform - Fringe Director - August 2024 (Just the Tonic during the Edinburgh Fringe)
- Bedlam Festival - Festival Director and Co-Programmer - January 2024 *
- Paradok Platform - Fringe Coordinator - August 2023 (Just the Tonic during the Edinburgh Fringe)
- Bedlam Festival - IT Manager - January 2023 *
- Give it a Go Week - Venue Manager - January 2023 *
- Paradok Platform - Treasurer - August 2022 (Just the Tonic during the Edinburgh Fringe)
- Freshers’ Plays - Creative Director/Coordinator - September 2022 *
- Welcome Week - Creative Director/Coordinator - September 2022 *
- Festival of New Theatre in Scotland - Programmer - March 2022 (Teviot Underground)
- Scottish Online Student Drama Festival - March 2021 (Online)
Shows
- Whatever You Want - Producer - April 2024 (Embassy Gallery)
- Glangtivity - Director - December 2023 *
- The Welkin - Sound and Projection Manager - October 2023 *
- Guards, Guards! - Composer - October 2023 *
- Julius Caesar - Production Manager - March 2023 (Teviot Debating Hall)
- Into the Pantoverse - Producer - December 2022 *
- The Rip Current - Co-Sound Designer - August 2022 (Pleasance Above)
- Ondine - Producer - March 2022 (Teviot Underground)
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Production Manager - March 2022 (Assembly Roxy - Central)
- Bedlam Haunted House - Composer/Sound Designer - October 2021 *
- Songs from the Bedlam - Creative Director - October 2021 *
- Catching Up - Tech Manager/Sound Designer - August 2021 (theSpace @ Symposium Hall)
- Zoogmalion - Producer - February 2021 (online)
- Trials and Tribulations - Lighting Designer - January 2020 *
- The Odyssey in 60 Minutes - Co-Director/Writer - January 2020 *
- William Shakespeare’s Christmas Carol - Sound Designer - November 2019 *
The Rip Current
Guards! Guards!
Acting
- Princess Ida - April 2025 (Pleasance Theatre)
- Glangtivity - December 2024 *
- Biolanthe - April 2024 (Summerhall)
- HMS Pinafore - April 2023 *
Committees
I was President (2022-2023) and Business Manager (2021-2022) for the Edinburgh University Theatre Company, who fully operate the Bedlam Theatre, and Treasurer (2022-2023), President (2021-2022), and Secretary (2020-2021) for Theatre Paradok. During my time, we reopened the theatre after the covid-19 pandemic and I led the efforts for our return as a venue to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023.
Black Lightning is the Ruby on Rails application behind bedlamtheatre.co.uk: the public website, show archive, and internal administration system of the Edinburgh University Theatre Company. This app keeps proposals, shows, seasons, and members organised across yearly committee turnover.
I took over maintenance of a codebase that had outlived several generations of student developers and carried it through major upgrades, from Rails 5 all the way to Rails 8, modernising the stack and Dockerising deployment along the way. It is where I learned most of my web development and product skills, because production code with real users is the best teacher.