Vanessa Oakes trained as a theatre designer and worked extensively in scenography, community arts and arts administration before becoming a full-time playwright and freelance producer.
She writes plays and text for a wide variety of people and spaces. Her words have been performed in theatres, art galleries and museums, community spaces, coal vaults, beneath a ring road, in an award-winning bungalow and at Latitude.
Vanessa is a Theatre Absolute Associate and a member of WGGB
Current projects include: Mademoiselle F at the Shop Front Theatre 9th – 12th June 2021 (tickets here); Power of Invention 30th & 31st July & 7 August 2021 (BOLDtext @ Soho House Museum); Her Day Opera (librettist) with Sayan Kent (composer) for March 2022; Bill The Bastard – a new short for COMMON WEALTH (BOLDtext at The REP); Me, Nic & Jo (Meander Theatre).
Plays include: All Is Well (the estate), A New Way of Living (andsome), Runaway Boy (Teatro Youth Theatre), Do What You Do (Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery Centenary community tour), The Oracle of the Taprooms (George Eliot Writer in Residence), The Game Anew (Pentabus), The Watched Sea (CAPITAL), The Permitted Number (Paines Plough), I Am Active (Red Teapot), The Kindness of Strangers (Warwick Words), Lost in Paradise CV6 (Belgrade Theatre), A Body Moving Through (the estate), Live Like Us (Belgrade Theatre).
For BOLDtext Open Door @ Birmingham Repertory Theatre: Offences Against the Person (THE SENTENCE), Taking Care of Business (A Mouthful of Rhinestones), The Invariant Right (INSATIABLE), Mademoiselle F (DISORDER) Glastonbury (EUROTRASHED), All Is Well (Doubled Up), The Arnolfini Portrait (LEAP), I’m Staying (Sunstroke), an act of determining the total number of something (The Russell Brand Effect), The Other Me (Selfies), A Diary Without Dates (Rep Night One).
For BOLDtext: What Do You Want? (FOLLOW ME) Birmingham Weekender in Digbeth, Twitty (BEHIND BARS Ghosts of the Lock-Up) @ Steelhouse Lane.
Find out more on Vanessa’s website
