Caroline Williams

Caroline is an award-winning director and multi-disciplinary artist. She is currently Associate Artist at The Bristol Old Vic and is an alumnus of The National Theatre Director’s Course.

Caroline’s work has ranged from a flash mob take over of the British Museum (Millions of Years, ENO) to a one-on-one installation-performance inside a cardboard box performed by migrants (Make Yourself At Home, Nuit Blanche Brussels). With a background in social and environmental activism (Drax 29), her work has often been co-created with people affected by current political issues. Examples include working with Syrian filmmaker Reem Karssli to explore the semantics of screens in witnessing global conflicts from the UK (Now Is the Time to Say Nothing, extensive touring 2018/19 produced by MAYK) or with residents of Tower Hamlets to explore deaths in police custody in East London (You Do Not Have To Say Anything, The Yard Theatre).

“If the essence of theatre is an invitation to imagine that we are someone else and for a moment to see the world through their eyes, then this is truly theatre at its most essential” — Tom Morris, Former Artistic Director, Bristol Old Vic, on Caroline Williams’ Now is the Time to Say Nothing

The Wampus

Loosely based on the Greek myth Iphigenia, the play is about love and survival in a family where an unsolved illness challenges and provokes family norms. The Wampus* will be an exploration of how the disabled experience challenges capitalist norms. It will swim in the waters of born-again Christians, corporate America, as well as Native American legend and myth. It will attempt to ask who are the gods we should be praying to and is anybody really still punished for cutting down one, or even a million, trees?

*The Wampus is a fearsome Appalachian and Cherokee creature, often described as a six-legged, fanged, feline beast or a half-woman/half-mountain lion phantom that haunts dense forests.

Georgi Arthur

Georgi is an Essex-based actor-singer with a passion for writing. A 2024 graduate of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, she is a recipient of the SOLT Laurence Olivier Bursary and a Spotlight Prize Award Finalist. She has been cast in Kenneth Branagh’s feature The Last Disturbance of Madeline Hyde and will be seen in Season 3 of Apple TV’s Silo as a recurring character. Having shared her poetry on social media, she has been featured on both BBC radio and the online magazine Why I Love Pink with her poem Call me ugly. Being a plus size artist allows her a unique perspective into the everyday, and has had a large influence over her work. Having performed in CRIPtic’s The Acts 2025, she decided to apply for the Reach programme to steer her written work into the world of playwriting.

Title TBC

A one woman comedy that explores how femininity can be stripped from you as a fat woman. Throughout the play, we follow a woman trying to re-claim what was stripped from her through her hideous dating debacles. She has many questionable methods of establishing her womanhood, none of which seem to be working, begging the question – what does it really mean to be a woman today?

Kimberley Capero

Kimberley (she/they) is an East London/Essex born working class artist. She trained at East 15 Acting School and works across theatre, drag, vo/audio, film and community projects. Kimberley’s theatre credits include Gaggle at Soho Theatre and Alice in Rotterdam by Jon Brittain. Spoiler Rotten, Kim’s drag king persona was born on Soho Theatre’s Drag & Cabaret Lab in 2021. He was a finalist in Man Up & NADC All Stars (supported by Royal Central School of Speech and Drama).

Petrol head drag king Spoiler Rotten has revved engines at Edinburgh Fringe, Glastonbury, Latitude, Mighty Hoopla, Camden People’s Theatre, The RVT, Roundhouse & Clapham Grand. Spoiler hails from Dagenham & is a tool to explore & reframe working class masculinity and queerness. Kim works closely on community projects in Barking and Dagenham and is passionate about working locally in outer East London. She is the recipient of a recent Catalyst Comission from Queens Theatre Hornchurch.

Screen credits include BAFTA nominated short Brown Brit (2024). Audio credits incl. Final Fantasy Tactics (2025), What A Way to Go by Bella Mackie (2025), The Woman From Book Club (2025).

Disneyland in Dagenham

1980. Disney’s pre-Paris theme park bid was rejected due to proximity to industrial areas, including the Ford Factory & neighbouring sewage works. Too unsanitary for Mickey Mouse.

2008. People lose their jobs at the Ford Factory. Class divide worsens. The area is intersected by the A13 road, which has the financial hub of Canary Wharf on one side, and some of the poorest areas of the country on the other side.

2026? I’m exploring what if. What if they did build Disneyland here and it forced people out of their homes and jobs. Ford becomes Disneyland. Disneyland becomes Dagenham. Dagenham becomes a tourist hot spot. Disneyland is a metaphor for the class takeover and gentrification spreading out of London.

Petrol head Spoiler Rotten serves as a familiar version of relatable masculinity, & as light, comedic relief to explore tough topics of social class through an inherently queer & political lens of drag. Disneyland in Dagenham (DiD) observes verbatim perspectives from within the borough, including my own, with a semi auto-biographical element to observing how marginalised people & those on the intersections of society are hardest hit by economical & environmental issues incl. pollution, industrial collapse & planned obsolescence.

Maya Owen

Maya Owen is an anti-disciplinary artist and activist based between London and Essex. Her work tends towards reparative histories, utopian futures, and the interconnectedness of everything.

Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies, longlisted for Palette Poetry’s Emerging Poet Prize, Foundlings Press’ Ralph Angel Poetry Prize (selected by Mary Ruefle), and highlighted in Frontier Poetry’s list of Exceptional Poetry From Around the Web.

As a theatremaker, she constructs a queer-feminist magic realism that centres fabulous creatures, monstered others, and spectacles of transgression. Two of her short plays, YOU DON’T HAVE TO STAY HERE BUT YOU CAN’T GO HOME and SPREAD have been produced, respectively, as part of KDC
Theatre‘s New Writing Competition and for UntoldCollectiv‘s Short & Mighty programme. She developed and performed her original act WET WORK as part of Carnesky’s Radical Cabaret School, and again at Club Silly.

She also makes art pop for outsiders as Maya Celia, and is working on her debut EP with Iona Catherine Productions!

If you meet her at a party, she will tell you she is Mad, gay, and once broke into the British Museum inside a wooden horse.

Title TBC

I will be writing my first full-length show – a gay enemies-to-lovers romcom (and possible acapella musical) about death, freakery, and the origins of psychosis, set during the Cambrian Explosion, within the collective unconscious, and throughout the mysteries of deep time.

Rana Bader

Rana Bader is a Palestinian Muslim actor and theatre maker from London. Her formative years spent training across various theatre companies in the UK, have shaped her into the artist she is today. One of these is the National Youth Theatre, where she is one of the curators of the Made by Members project,
Access Acquired.

In 2022-2023 Rana completed the Performing Arts Foundation Diploma at LAMDA, before going on to work professionally as an actor.

Rana recently took part in the Old Vic Theatre Makers programme, where she found her writing voice and developed a scene. She is thrilled to have gained a place on the Reach programme, where she will continue developing this with CRIPtic and write her first play. Rana is excited about telling authentic stories that centre Muslim women living and working in the West, embedding humour and authenticity to challenge existing narratives.

Theatre credits include: Disciples (Stellar Quines) and Ibn Battuta Travels (Seenaryo)

Television credits include: We Might Regret This (BBC One)

Title TBC

A comedy play about a Muslim woman starting a new job in a predominantly White office. Alongside the already scary “new person” feeling, she finds herself navigating a series of awkward and absurd encounters with her co-workers. From observing Ramadan, prayer room frustrations and (politely) declining pub lunches, the everyday misunderstandings reveal the humour and tension of Amina trying to get on with the day. Quick, familiar and apt.