FoulPlay Productions are comprised of performance graduates who individually excel in their fields as educators, artists and designers, and relish the opportunity to share the FoulPlay experience with new audiences. Foul Players have performed with various theatre companies including Whalley Range All Stars and Inconvenient Spoof. As well as producing theatre work of their own.
Jack Stigner
Artistic Director
Jack Stigner is an established theatre practitioner who has produced and directed theatre productions since 2007, shows ranging from the absurd, Ubu Roi , to Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Musicals, West Side Story.
All of Jack's work, regardless of style, is immediately visual and vibrantly visceral. A Jack Stigner production proudly places the audience at the centre of the experience, from their first encounter with the spectacle to their last thought. Jack has worked with actors, dancers and musicians in companies of all ages and ranges of experience. Jack is a trained workshop facilitator and teacher, and has directed pieces for the Shakespeare Schools Festival at the Royal Court and is a Globe Theatre Education Practitioner.
Jack has participated in a broad range of performance projects as a writer, director and performer. The predominant area in which he has extensively researched is the artist and spectator, or, performer and audience relationship. This has ultimately led to the exploration of audience empowerment in the presence and present of a performance event, whether it be through choice; movement; participation; implication; isolation or education. Jack’s primary interest when working for FoulPlay is to establish and enhance the world of the play for an audience; developing brave and bold live creations that embrace the experience of the immediate, believing beautifully crafted authentic spectacles encourage play and offer insight into the sublime; to empower audiences to be both witness and engineer.
Jack trained at Kingston and Brighton Universities studying Fine art, Theatre, Performance and Visual Art
Ulysses Black
Director, Designer
Ulysses Black is involved in numerous performance projects, operating at different levels from writer, director, assistant director, performer and occasionally technician. While many of these works find there way into the mythic narrative of the life of Ulysses Black, many are equally undertaken for either profit, experience or pleasure. Performance work generally occupies three distinct categories: Immersive Theatre, Puppetry and Live Art. Follow the links below to find out more concerning recent projects and performance engagements.
Over the years Ulysses Black has published numerous works detailing his work with ritual and related subjects. While the emphasis remains on ritual practice, much of the material has a strong biographical edge.
Annie Brooks
Performer, Designer
Annie Brooks is a performer, puppeteer and theatre maker based in Brighton. She is the artistic director of theatre company, Colossal Crumbs, which specializes in making highly visual theatre with puppets. She has designed and made puppets for Strangeface, Birmingham Stage Company, Whalley Range All Stars and Colossal Crumbs. Annie has perfromed most recently with Pins and Needles, Gomito, Whalley Range All Stars and Foul Play Productions.
After meeting an array of characters at the PAVA course at Brighton University, and after endless cups of tea, Annie decided to put all the strange characters that were dancing around in her brain out into the world in the form of puppets, toys, drawings and theatre shows. Her interest in sculptural set and costume was prominent in her first show, Colossal Crumbs, which incorporated these ideas with puppetry and silly dances. She works on a large scale (her biggest puppet to date towering at 10ft), whilst also altering perspective through the use of tiny, weeny puppets (they really are quite small)
Puppets are an important part of her work – enabling these odd creatures to come to life and frankly, to make it possible for a tomato to be the protagonist of a theatre show (after all, tomatoes need to have their say too)