The Signalman; what else have you seen?
Our latest show, The Signalman, is a new adaptation written by Jonathan Holloway. If you’ve been following Creation for any length of time you’ll have seen Jonathan’s work before, so we thought it might be nice to give a rundown of some of the productions he’s written and directed for us:
The Time Machine, The London Library, Spring 2020
Jonathan wrote the adaptation for the scarily-prescient pre-pandemic production. How did he predict a global pandemic, spread by international air travel with New Zealand faring better than most? By having lots of interesting conversations with academics from The Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities in the course of writing the script. How did he know to include the word ‘Zoom’ to represent time travel long before any of us had got used to using the word on a daily basis? – Wizardry?!
Don Quixote, The Covered Market, late summer 2019
Did you lose your heart to Dom and Sam in the summer of 2019? This adaptation, written and directed by Jonathan, took Don Quixote as its inspiration, but transposed the story to two friends of a certain age tinkering with their caravan, ahead of an epic quest along the A40 to Fishguard. Beautifully wistful, occasionally crude and always very clever this show stands as a firm favourite among Creation fans.
Brave New World, Westgate Oxford, Summer 2018
Anyone who saw this show, in the newly opened Westgate Centre, will carry with them forever the memory of bemused shoppers wandering through the action with armfulls of bags, while Huxley’s dystopian future unravelled around them. With audience seated on swivel chairs and wearing silent disco headphones Jonathan directed a show that inhabited its location fully, whilst also setting the audience apart in their own private world.
1984, The Mathematics Institute, spring 2017
As Trump rose to power and 1984 hit the top of bestseller lists worldwide, Jonathan’s adaptation of Orwell’s chilling vision of the future pulled no punches. Using the stunning setting of The Maths Institute to full effect incorporating webcams, dozens of screens and harsh strip lights, this show split open a classic of modern literature – a testament to Jonathan’s skill for creating such direct connections between text and audience.
Macbeth, Lady Margaret Hall, summer 2014
Jonathan’s first Creation show and Creation’s first at LMH. The action was transposed to a sanitorium in the years after the First World War, grounding ghostly apparitions and insatiable lust for power in a chilling context. The visual scope of the show was huge, with banners hung from the roof of LMH and the audience seated around large tables on the sprawling lawns.
More where that came from
The Signalman, Wesley Memorial Church, 11-25 March
Jonathan has written and will direct this year’s spring show at Wesley Memorial Church in central Oxford. The adaptation was commission for BBC Radio 4 and aired on Christmas day 2022. Tickets are on sale now and selling fast.