Theatre News

Caroline Steinbeis Wins Prestigious JMK Award for Young Directors

| Off-West End |

22 June 2009

Caroline Steinbeis has become the 12th winner of the annual JMK Award, the UK’s most coveted accolade for young directors. She will be directing Caryl Churchill’s 1990 play, Mad Forest, at the BAC. The production, which will run in the main space from 17 July to 8 August, explores the reactions of ordinary Romanian people to the confused events of December 1989.

The JMK Award is supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, BAC and the Ian Ritchie Foundation and each year gives one young director the chance to stage their own production of a classic text. Previous winners include Theo Sharrock (2000) and Polly Findley (2007), whose production of Thyestes is currently running at the Arcola.

Mad Forest was first performed at the Central School of Speech and Drama in June 1990. It was the culmination of a research trip that saw Churchill and a group of acting students travel to Romania to live and work with Romanian drama students immediately following the fall of the Ceauşescu regime. Churchill’s aim was to write a play about the revolution that brought about this fall, based on the accounts of ordinary people. Steinbeis’s production marks the 20th anniversary of the revolution.

Steinbeis’s previous work includes a rehearsed reading of The Curator at Soho Theatre, the UK tour of the award-winning Mile End, and Photo Story at the BAC. She attended the Directors’ Course at the National Theatre Studio in 2008 and has assisted on productions at the National Theatre, Globe and Traverse Theatre.