Jonathan Holloway

Jonathan Holloway (born 1955 in Dulwich, South London) is an English theatre director and playwright. He founded and directed two professional companies in British fringe and touring theatre in the 1980s and 1990s, notably Red Shift Theatre Company. His work has won three Edinburgh Fringe First awards (1987, 1988, 1989),

Red Shift

In 1982 Holloway, in collaboration with the designer Charlotte Humpston, founded a group called Red Shift Theatre Company, which grew into a medium-sized national touring company. Holloway directed nearly all of Red Shift's over 50 shows and also wrote plays performed by the company. Red Shift gave around 175 performances annually, mainly in the UK but also in Egypt, Santiago de Chile and Hong Kong. The Guardians Lynn Gardner observed in 2003 that under Holloway's artistic direction, Red Shift was one of the very few theatre companies to have survived more than twenty years, describing it as "tireless". The company became known for "reworking classic tales into fun theatre shows", as well as for "its heady mix of entertainment and aesthetics". Robert Shaughnessy wrote in 2013 that the company in the 1980s had an "appealingly original, innovative and occasionally iconoclastic way with classic texts". An early production was the successful The Duchess of Malfi (1982–84), at the Edinburgh Festival and then on tour, which used a 1950s setting and referenced films. This was followed by a "disastrous" version of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four with students of the University of Surrey.

In 1989, its production of Timon of Athens was the subject of a The Late Show special on BBC2. and like Romeo and Juliet, used repeated scenes "to destabilize both textual and production authority".

A 2002 reworking of Nicholas Nickleby (at the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury) reset Dickens' tale in the 1950s, described as a "potentially very clever wheeze" by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian. The play focused on the conflict between the idealism of the young and the corruption of their elders.

In addition to The Late Show, the company was featured on Edinburgh Nights (BBC2) and Kaleidoscope (Radio 4).

Other directing and later career

Holloway directed The Playboy of the Western World in Ireland and Le Misanthrope in Boston, USA, and he advised on the 2008 Gifford's Circus show Caravan. He has developed a series of open-air performances at festivals, under the title The Invisible Show.

In 2017 he began writing and directing a series of shows for Oxford's Creation Theatre Company including Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Mathematics Institute, and in 2019 a re-imagining of Don Quixote in the Covered Market.

He was briefly Head of Performing Arts at Middlesex University and has taught at Brooklands Technical College (Weybridge), St Mary's University College and Royal Holloway University of London, and was Artist in Residence at Central School of Speech and Drama and Artistic Associate at Kingston University.

He has made guest appearances on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read and appeared on a feature about the Arthur Mee Children's Encyclopaedia with the artist Grayson Perry. and Vertigo (2008), all for Nottingham Playhouse.

Holloway has also written and directed many plays for BBC Radio, including adaptations of Citizen Kane, Strangers and Brothers, and Brave New World, the TV series The Man From Uncle, stories by George Eliot, Willa Cather, Walter de la Mare, Evelyn Waugh, Heinrich Boll, Leo Tolstoy and Andrew Motion, as well as Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy, Goethe's Faust and Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. He has written radio plays celebrating the George Orwell centenary, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death and the Arthur Miller Centenary.