Paul Whitfield
Director and Writer

Paul is a published playwright with a long and proven track record in writing for young people. He worked for fifteen years as a teacher in secondary schools in Derbyshire, most notably as Head of Expressive Arts at Hasland Hall School in Chesterfield for 8 years.

He was the founding director of the Lost Cause Youth Theatre for which he wrote About Face (performed at Edinburgh Fringe), Precious and A Game in Two Halves, both of which were performed at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. All three plays were subsequently published by NATE as part of their ‘Cracking Scripts’ series in 2001.
Paul wrote the screenplays for film versions of About Face (1999) and Precious (2001), distributed on DVD to secondary schools across the region.

His musical The Girl, the Garden and the Glow-worm was the centre piece of a community arts project in Sheffield involving 75 young people, and was also performed at the Crucible as part of the 2003 Children’s Festival.

For Brief Candle Theatre Paul has written ten plays since 2002, for a wide range of audiences, and covering a dazzling breadth of issues. They are Clean?, Tight, Shattered, True Colours, Story-Rider, Blood and Stone, The Tower, Forever, Cut and Interference.

He was commissioned to write screenplays of Clean? and True Colours for film versions recorded in 2005 and 2006.

Other writing includes It Happened to Me, a personal safety training video for Birmingham Education Authority, Learndirect Centre Guidelines, a training film for Learndirect, Parents Puberty Survival Kit, a sequence of poems commissioned by North Derbyshire Health Promoting Schools, What Next?, a series of seven short plays exploring issues around work, work experience and training commissioned by the Derbyshire Education Business Partnership, Opening Hearts, a sequence of literacy materials for use in primary schools as a resource to help tackle homophobic bullying. The materials included short stories, poems, a full play script and soap opera style TV scripts, commissioned by North Derbyshire Health Promoting Schools and the National Healthy Schools Standard.

Paul has written a range of drama and health related teaching materials to accompany theatre and video education projects, including What Can I Say? (sexual health), Living Proof (gender, identity and homophobia), About Face (mental health and young carers).

Paul has directed young people’s productions of About Face, Precious and A Game in Two Halves, as well as productions of Clean?, Tight, Shattered, True Colours, The Tower, Story-Rider and Interference for Brief Candle Theatre.

He has designed and led a wide range of INSET and training events for clients including Derbyshire LEA, Derbyshire Health Promoting Schools, Derbyshire Association for Teachers of Drama, Nottingham University, Loughborough University and the Royal National Theatre. Paul is currently leading writing workshops for the Pomegranate Theatre, Chesterfield as part of the Pomegranate Theatre’s New Writing Festival.

“Young people are a discerning and sophisticated audience. They are too often underestimated. In my experience they relish the chance to engage with work that is exciting, imaginative and challenging. They deserve the opportunity to experience the highest quality drama and theatre, and that’s what I try to create for them. The only way to do that is by listening to them, learning from them and engaging honestly and openly with them. It makes writing and producing work with Brief Candle Theatre constantly challenging and enormously rewarding.”

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