Co-Artistic Director/ Director of Spies Like Us OLLIE NORTON-SMITH
Ollie Norton-Smith (04–15) is the Co-Artistic Director of theatre company Spies Like Us. He directed Our Man In Havana and Woyzeck having written the script for both productions with Hamish Lloyd Barnes. Below are excerpts from Ollie’s blog about putting on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Starting with one silly idea… ‘We got started because I had a silly idea. A very silly idea. I had read Graham Greene’s classic spy satire a few years ago and fallen in love with the evocative world full of colours and smells and silliness that he created. The hero of the novel, who is accidentally recruited by the British Secret Service in a dazzling instance of assumption, sells vacuum cleaners and fabricates his reports, sending drawings of vacuum cleaner parts but pretending they are military installations in the mountains. I thought it would be funny to create a show where every single thing that the audience sees is created
with parts of a vacuum cleaner. So, we did it. Trusting in the ideas you have is vital at this early stage.’
‘Spies Like Us are hugely gifted, and it feels like you are being let in on a secret when you watch one of their shows.’ Everything Theatre
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