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
  • Bedlam Theatre (January 2024)
  • Edinburgh Fringe (August 2024): reviewed by The Stage and A Young(ish) Perspective
  • Traverse Theatre (December 2024)
  • Duns Play Fest (May 2025)
  • Edinburgh Fringe (August 2025)
• 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: Edinburgh Fringe (August 2024)

Running a venue at the Edinburgh Fringe means welcoming hundreds of performances in a month, and having to change between them in minutes. I’ve been there in several roles:

• 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.
• Bedlam Fringe 2023 (Front of House Manager & Programmer): I led the 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 consolidating the procedures based on last year’s experience.
• Bedlam Fringe 2026 (Production Manager): currently production-managing the venue for this year’s festival.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has around 3,500 shows. I used to read the programme cover-to-cover, but that still didn’t tell me much about the shows themselves and which ones I should really go see, so I built the tool I wanted instead: a chat interface where you can just ask the programme what you should go see.

Under the hood it’s a RAG pipeline which does semantic search over the festival data with ChromaDB vector storage, category filtering, and a FastAPI backend serving a React/TypeScript frontend.

ImpAmp is the soundboard Bedlam Theatre uses for live improv comedy, where a sound effect is only funny if you can find it before the performers move on. It supports multiple soundbanks, instant search, arming tracks, multiple sounds per pad, and Google Drive sync so you can share your soundbanks with the whole team.

This third version contains many improvements over the previous versions developed by the previous generation of IT, and was also an experiment in AI-driven development: I built it in Next.js using Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 back when agentic AI coding was just a few months old. It has been used to run shows ever since.

During university (and a little after), I took part in over thirty productions and festivals as production manager, producer, director, technician, composer, and actor. I also spent two years on the committee of the Edinburgh University Theatre Company, the student company that fully operates the Bedlam Theatre: as Business Manager and later President, I helped reopen the theatre after the Covid-19 pandemic and led its return as an Edinburgh Fringe venue in 2023. I also was on the committee for Theatre Paradok as Secretary, President and Treasurer, putting on a wide array of experimental shows all over Edinburgh.

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 *

Black Lightning is the Ruby on Rails application behind bedlamtheatre.co.uk. It hosts the public website, show archive, and internal administration system of the Edinburgh University Theatre Company. This app keeps proposals, shows, seasons, and members organised and manageable for the committee and show teams.

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 you learn most when writing code that is actually used by users who need it to do their jobs.