WHAT WE DO
We are merely players…
Playing with the audience. Playing with perspective. Playing with space.
Our work re-imagines old tales told anew, champions unheard voices and places audiences right at the heart of it. Our queer-led core team collaborates with performers and other creatives to explore who tells which stories, why and how. Like the ‘strolling players’ of the past, we perform indoors, outdoors and not in theatres at all.
Born out of the pandemic, we’ve put on a theatre festival, brought the Wild West to London, performed in a reconstructed Neolithic & Bronze Age roundhouse… and we’re only just getting started.
ORIGIN STORY
Old School Players are an award-nominated company born out of the March 2020 lockdown. Their critically-acclaimed productions of On Dover Beach (Tom Stoppard) and Afterplay (Brian Friel) in summer 2020 brought much-needed entertainment and community to local people. In July 2021 they brought the Old School Festival to Dorset, the first of its kind in the area and one of the first arts festivals to happen since the return of live theatre after the pandemic.
Showcasing new work by emerging theatre companies that hadn’t had a chance to perform in the past eighteen months, it was a three day celebration of the resilience of the arts. Six Serpents and a Tarantula (written by co-founder Maryanna Clarke) toured in August and transferred to the Hen and Chickens Theatre in London in November 2021. As offspring of those dark days in Lockdown #1, Old School Players are keen to keep people’s imaginations burning in whatever way they can.
CORE TEAM
Maryanna Clarke Co-founder
Maryanna is an Irish writer, actor and theatre-maker. In 2020 she co-founded Old School Players Theatre Company, performing for the rural Dorset community during the pandemic. She co-produced the Old School Theatre Festival in 2021, simultaneously debuting her play ‘Six Serpents and a Tarantula’, an all-female Western, which picked up five-star reviews and a Standing Ovation Nomination at the Camden Fringe and on tour. She is producing the Old School Theatre Festival, now Labryinth Arts Festival, once again for 2024. She is also the author of the first collaborative NFT, crypto-novel The Oracle’s Verse, found on NFT platform BlockBook. Credits as an actor include The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare’s Globe) and award-winning short film The Ceremony (Hall Productions). Her multidisciplinary background has forged her voice as a writer; a lyrical and humorous explorer of powerful stories around queerness, magical realism and epic, myth-style themes. Her new play, Moonlight Supermarket, is programmed with Omnibus Theatre for August/September 2024.
Benedetta Scuto Co-founder
Benedetta Scuto is an Italian actor, pianist and theatre-maker. Graduated from the Conservatory Vincenzo Bellini as a classical pianist and from the University of Geneva as a legal translator, she combines her high disciplined academic and musical skills with her Sicilian vulcanic enthusiasm in life and performance. She debuted as a writer and director with the piece Slow Death of a Lotus Flower which premiered at the Old School Festival (July 2021) transferring to London at the Etcetera Theatre (August 2021) Drayton Arms and Golden Goose Theatres (March 2022). Her credits for Old School Players include Moonlight Supermarket and On Dover Beach.
