Actor, director and performance storyteller
Debs is a theatre artist based in London and West Yorkshire. She is an actor, director and performance storyteller, working across a range of theatre forms, with a love of work that playfully explores performer-audience relationships.
Debs writes powerful one-woman shows, sometimes directs them, and tours them internationally. She works very closely with acclaimed director John Wright (co-founder of Told by an Idiot) and with musicians on some of her shows, and frequently collaborates on other projects with artists and companies as performer, deviser, writer, or director.
Debs is an exciting and skilled writer-performer. Her work puts the poetic and the irreverent side by side, and often mixes modern theatre forms with the intimacy and informality of storytelling.
Her solo show, Lost In Blue, directed by John Wright, won 4 and 5 star reviews at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe, and her acclaimed retelling of King Lear took its second national tour in 2017. Debs’ work as an actor and director has seen collaboration with the BBC, the Royal Opera House, the British Library, the Southbank Centre, Hay Festival, Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, and many prestigious theatres and festivals in the UK, US and Europe.
Winner of the Summerhall 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Award for Acting, twice voted one of the top five acts at the Towersey Festival (the only spoken word artist in its fifty year history ever to achieve this), Debs is FUSE playwright at the Leeds Playhouse, associate artist at Square Chapel, and storyteller and education consultant for Shakespeare’s Globe.