š£ donāt be shy, be a shan š£
day in my jobbing actor life working in my fave theatre in the whole world @tbtlake with young Cumbrian actors š„³
#dayinmylifevlog #actordayinthelife #disabledactor #vlog
pop up briefly in ep5 of this glorious show. thank you for having me.
THE CAGE on BBC from today.
my head is so big i kept getting indentation lines from me wig.
i finally stopped cowering about being a secret poet and submitted to @disabilityarts Our Right To Thrive competition. first time in over a decade iāve shared my poetry publicly š
gonna try use social media to share more of my work cos we can only back ourselves i guess.
congratulations to the winners! and congrats to all submitted š„° find all the submissions on the Our Right To Thrive blog pages on @disabilityarts
This is perhaps one of the most vulnerable things I've ever written. I put my heart and soul into it and honestly I am disappointed with the lack of engagement. Not to make it about optics, but the stats are telling. Usually me sharing work on here gets lots of engagement. I am so happy to have so many supportive people in my digital sphere. But I have had 11 likes on this. I have had two messages from people listening to it. People do not want to have the conversation about class. You all want to sweep it under the rug. You all do not want to acknowledge your own financial privilege because you think it negates your own hard work. You do not want to see class as anything else but wealth or lack of. Class is cultural. I am a GOBSHITE. I will forever, and always be, a GOBSHITE. And this GOBSHITE will not shut up ever about class until the serious work is done. I'm here out of spite. Thank you to @rtyds_uk for this opportunity. Thank you to @shooby_cat for being one of the only people I trust to have a decent, progressive conversation with about class. Thank you to @stefodriscoll for working with me on this piece way back when. And to the both of them, and everyone else, on this pioneering Fair Play project. And finally thank you to everyone who's read this, who will go and listen to these four incredibly powerful important testimonies on class, and who will decide, from today, to make it a priority and a centre point of the conversation. And sod the rest of you. It's 2026. Go be boring somewhere else. Link in bio x
šø @nicholasdawkesphotography
Nick is a magic maker. finally some headshots that feel purposeful, full of versatility and range, and importantly feeeeel like me. itās been a long old while. happy eh.
guess which one is:
- my application to become the new face of Linkedin
- my cumbrian birthright to have my hand up the arsehole of a yow solving a murder on the side of a fell
- scrubbing a stone floor 70 years ago secretly teaching herself to read and wishing to go uni
- a grieving northern young mam against the odds (the drama school branding hasnāt faded yet)
song for the vibes only as itās one of the best songs ever written.
šlake bled, slovenia šøš®
cumbrian goes abroad and must find a lake. swipe to see the results of four years at drama school. like what you see? iām hopelessly unemployed and will shake anything for equity minimum (eyelashes included) all the best x
šljubljana, slovenia šøš®
what a friendly, clean, ecologically conscious, kind, chill culture and country that cares about art, literature (more than anywhere iāve been) safety and peace. catch me moving me here swear.
Lady M is a part iāve always wanted to tackle but thought iād never get the opportunity to. being on the journey of my body changing, iām recognising more and more disabled characters in the canon that are never properly housed. Lady M is one of them. to delve into her as a gynaelogically disabled woman myself and unearth the knottiest corners of her grappling with purpose, fertility, function, ableism in a world that demands her body to function in a way it cannot, has been the highest honour and fulfilment unparalleled. i can only hope itās brought a humanity to this fiend-like queen, and realise that it is not impairment that creates monsters, but society.
routinely being employed to return back to Shakespeare and unearthing further and further social and medical disability, whilst on my crusade to make the language the most understood to the least knowledgeable ear, is such a personal purpose. as with most writers that live longer on the page than in corporeal form, the work is littered with disability. we must seek to understand and mine it further. to create the most authentic and interesting choices.
reflecting on a lot after this job. from tackling Beatrice only three years ago as an autistic woman to make sense of the spikiest, bluntest, non-societally conforming parts of her, being held so safely by my company and vulnerably choosing to show a real meltdown on stage (a job, company and process i still cherish every single day)ā¦ to Titus with a phenomenal company of women and exploring a sonās want for his dad to be proud of him but never being able to live up to his great soldier of a fatherās expectations due to his bodyā¦ to now Lady Mā¦ iām hopeful and excited for the future. thatās 4 of his 37 plays professionally completed now. 33 to go.
thank you to everyone who made it, every audience, every gorgeous comment and review, every well wish.
Lady M? time to put you āto bed, to bed, to bedā x
U EXIT NOW having its rehearsed reading debut at @tbtlake on Friday 31st October š gassed to be part of CumbriaFest 2025 with a sensational line-up of homegrown talent.
U EXIT NOW is an anti-love letter to forced Cumbria diaspora and displacement, set on the brink of the village I spent my earliest years in, a place I still hold as sanctuary: Caldbeck.
swipe to see my exact same face on my primary school body.
tickets can be purchased on @tbtlake website! sharing the evening with the incomparable @nina_jayne_berry with her play Patience. check out the listings for all the other fab work over the festival!
