including Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah, Tell Tale Hearts and Common Chorus.

In 2015 Andrea wrote and published the children’s picture book Molly’s Marvellous Moustache which she adapted for performance and toured nationally with Fidget Theatre. Andrea’s other writing credits for the company include Jack Frost and Bird’s Nest Billy..ADAM Z. ROBINSON -CO-WRITERAdam is a writer and theatre-maker. His most recent projects include a brand new adaptation of A Christmas Carol (touring 2019-20) and brand new play Upon the Stair (Harrogate Theatre and tour 2020). His plays The Book of Darkness & Light and Shivers toured the UK extensively between 2016 and 2019, visiting more than 30 theatres.

He is the writer of Conscientious (national tour 2014); Seaside Terror (with Odd Doll Puppetry - touring currently); and the short film The Split (dir. Ed Rigg, starring Edward Hogg).

ADAM FOLEY LIGHTING & VIDEO DESIGNERAdam trained at the University of Hull and is the Head of Production at new writing company Silent Uproar. His theatrical credits include: Small Wonders (Punchdrunk); Imaam Imraan (NYT); Drip (Boundless & Script Club); The Culture and Our Mutual Friend (Hull Truck Theatre); A Super Happy Story (About Feeling Super Sad), Pig and Small Plans (Silent Uproar); The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Aladdin, and Dick Whittington (Middle Child); The Merry Wives (Northern Broadsides); Blackout (Greyscale); The Inappropriateness of Love, Freedom Books Flowers and the Moon, A Woman of No Importance… or Little Importance Anyhow, and Tartuffe (Paradigm Theatre).

ED HEATON SOUND DESIGNEREd has worked professionally as a Sound Designer and Music Producer since 1999. His work has been used on national tours for companies including Theatre Hullabulloo, Mind The Gap, TheatreCompany Blah, Blah, Blah and Fidget Theatre. His installations have been performed in venues such as the London Eye, Leeds Light Night and Manchester Royal Exchange.

Smile Club is his fourth collaboration with Red Ladder Theatre Company after Sound Design work for The Damned United, Ref, and Mother Courage & Her Children.

Ed also works professionally as a songwriter and has recently formed his own music publishing company Feel Good Music which specialises in making songs for TV and film.

BY ANDREA HEATON & ADAM Z. ROBINSON

CAST & CREATIVE TEAMANDREA HEATON - CO-WRITER / PERFORMERAndrea Heaton is a writer, performer and theatre maker based in Leeds. She is the co-artistic director of Fidget Theatre; a female-led company creating contemporary participatory theatre for family audiences.  Andrea has a wealth of varied experience with companies

Smile Club in rehearsal © Robling Photography

Photo © Natasha Arciniega

EMMA WILLIAMS - SET & COSTUME DESIGNEREmma Williams, set and costume designer, trained at Wimbledon School of Art. Recent work: Upon The Stair (Harrogate Theatre and tour); The Netherlands (Two Tonne); Abigail’s Party (Hull Truck); Jackie and the Beanstalk (Curly Tales); Bird’s Nest Billy, Molly’s Marvellous Moustache and Jack Frost (Fidget Theatre); A Shoe Full of Stars (Opera Schmopera); Bad Blood Blues (Theatre Delicatessen); A Soldier’s Tale (Skipton Camerata); Horace and the Yeti (Jack Dean Company); Shadows In Different Shades and Iyalode of Eti (Utopia); Just An Ordinary Lawyer (Tayo Aluko and friends); You Forgot The Mince (Imagine If ); CLICK and HD100 (Chol / Lawrence Batley Theatre); Brief Encounters@Bradford Interchange(Freedom Studios). Designs for Leeds Playhouse include Queen of Chapeltown, Refugee Boy, Immune, Runaway Diamonds, The Yellow Doctress, Two Tracks and Text Me, Scuffer, Sunbeam Terrace, Coming Around Again, You The Player: The Dutiful Daughter, Huddersfield, Crap Dad, The Elves and the Shoemakers, Pinocchio, The Magic Paintbrush, Broken Angel, and Nine Lives.

Other theatre and opera designs include Lost and Found, The Yellow Doctress, Somebody’s Son (Hidden Gems); The Shoe (Polka); Strawberries in January (Traverse); Daboyz (Pull Up A Chair); Of Mice and Men (Mind the Gap); Admeto, Partenope, Alceste (Cambridge Handel Opera); Elektra (Guildhall Studio); Angel (Leeds Studio Theatre); Small Objects of Desire (Soho Theatre) and The Swing Left (Unlimited). She has also designed numerous schools and participatory shows for Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah, among them Unmade Beds, Stuck, Thinskin, Antigone, The Dice Project, The Raft of the Medusa, Hide and Seek and her work with Alive and Kicking includes The Cave and Lighthouse Island.

ROD DIXON - DIRECTORRod Dixon is Artistic Director of Red Ladder Theatre Company and his passion is to make theatre which provokes conversation about the world in which we live. Before working with Red Ladder, Rod was associate director at The Barbican Theatre in Plymouth and as a freelancer directed several shows at Plymouth Theatre Royal including ‘Union Street’ with a cast of 230 local people. Rod ran The Hub Theatre School in Cornwall and before that was an actor with several touring companies including Kneehigh Theatre.

For Red Ladder, Rod has directed the majority of the shows since 2006 with recent hits including: The Parting Glass (2019); The Damned United (2016/2018); with West Yorkshire Playhouse, The Shed Crew (2017); Mother Courage and Her Children (Red Ladder’s 50th anniversary production, 2018); and Glory (2019) with The Dukes Playhouse, Lancaster.

RED LADDER: STAFF TEAMRod Dixon – Artistic DirectorChris Lloyd – ProducerAlice Barber – Creative ProducerTom Blackband – Technical ManagerSasha Hawkes – Marketing ManagerChris O’Connor – Social Media ManagerLindsay Rodden - DramaturgFaye Dawson – Press & PR

RED LADDER BOARDDaniel Bye, Tessa Gordziejko [Chair], Craig Jefferies, Jamie Jones-Buchanan, Amy Leach, Emma McDowell, Martyn Potter, Ben Rothera, Lucinda Yeadon

ABOUT RED LADDERRed Ladder Theatre Company is one of Britain’s leading national touring companies, dedicated to producing high quality work which contributes to social change and global justice. We champion new writing, particularly that which challenges or agitates and gives a voice to those who are often unheard on our stages. Through Red Ladder Local, we take exceptional new writing into non-theatre spaces such as sports clubs, Working Men’s Clubs, social clubs and miners’ welfare halls.

ABOUT THE SHOWSmile Club takes place in a dystopian world, in which a government drive exists to tame and prune unruly women deemed unable to fit into society. Like most classic dystopias, Smile Club is set in the future, but rarely are the classics about anything other than the time in which they were written. 1984 by Orwell, as published in 1949, was as much a reflection on the nationalism, censorship and surveillance of the time as it was a warning for the future, during the onset of the cold war. So how much of Lisa’s experience of the Smile Club is present in the lives of her writers, and how much is this show about the present state of things?

Writer/performer Andrea tells us that she loves finding inspiration for story telling in both truth and fiction, “the ambiguity so often found in retelling of real life events is fascinating. We spent a long time crafting the universe of Smile Club, drawing on the dystopian excellence of The Handmaid’s Tale and Black Mirror to develop the history, the social context, and the ways in which it might differ from our own world”. Writer Adam reflects that the original concept drew from two things, “firstly, a story about a friend-of-a-friend of Andrea’s who had been stopped at a barrier in a train station until she gave the man a smile. Secondly, a particularly chilling image Andrea had found on the internet of a woman with a cartoon smile strapped to her face. The accompanying story was about ‘smile clinics’; places somewhere in Europe in the 1950s where husbands could send their wives if they were ‘struggling to get along’ in society. It turned out to be a fake story – but the idea and image really resonated.” The show also finds resonance amidst contemporary conversations around the #MeToo movement, the gender pay-gap, and the proliferation of sexual harassment and everyday sexism. On what this show can do in this setting, Andrea goes on, “I want audiences to connect with the human struggle of the characters and experience something that resonates beyond their evening in the theatre, creates conversations and sparks stories and debate. The best stories leave you feeling changed, even in some small way, be that personal political or a little of both; I hope Smile Club can do that”.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSWith thanks to Arts Council England for funding both the R&D and the tour of the show. Thanks to Square Chapel Arts Centre and Leeds City College for providing rehearsal space. Special thanks to Ruth Cooper, for directing the show in development. Thanks to Adam Foley (visuals) & Ed Heaton (sound) who designed the Smile Club trailer and Lynsey Jones & Luke Dickson for providing the voiceovers. Thanks to Harrogate Theatre & Square Chapel Arts Centre for supporting the show in development and to Lazenby Brown for their work on the marketing concept & design. And finally thanks to all Red Ladder’s audiences, supporters, Ladderistas, partners, staff and board members - without your valuable support and work, none of this would be possible!

ON TOUR NOVEMBER 2021

Smile Club in rehearsal © Robling Photography

Photo © Robling Photography