Q&A with Alex Hill, writer and performer of Why I Stuck A Flare up My A*** for England!
By Amie Johnson
Wednesday 27 May 19:30
A huge welcome back to Rugby’s Macready Theatre! Are you excited to be returning?
Incredibly excited and very grateful to be coming back. Playing the Macready last year was one of the highlights of the tour. It was such a warm audience and a brilliant space to share the work.
Since you came here with the show in January 2025, what have you been up to?
We have taken the show to Australia twice. In 2025 we played the Adelaide Fringe and won Best Overall Theatre, and we returned more recently, adding Perth Fringe where we picked up Best Theatre, which was a real honour. We also completed our third and final Edinburgh Fringe, toured the show to Iceland, and had a London run at Underbelly Boulevard in Soho.
Our audiences who came to see Why I Stuck A Flare Up My A*** For England last year will be delighted to see you again. What can they expect to be different this time around?
The show has developed a lot! TV and Broadcasting legends Ben Shephard and Chris Kamara now feature in the play and have lent their voices to the show. We also introduced video design, which adds a new layer, and overall, it feels more dynamic and playful. There is a bit more audience interaction and fun throughout. It is also the last time this production will be performed in Rugby before we finish in July, following the West End and New York dates this summer.
Who was Why I Stuck A Flare Up My A*** For England created for? Is there a message you hope the audience will take away from the show?
The show was created for anyone who has ever felt like they have done something out of character just to fit in. I had young men like me in mind, who can sometimes feel lost in a changing world and use football as a form of escapism and identity. Ultimately, it is for everyone. At its heart, it is about friendship and the importance of checking in on your mates.
Lastly, can you give us three words to describe Why I Stuck A Flare Up My A*** For England?
From Edinburgh Fringe to Real-World Impact: How One Show Sparked a Movement
What began as a visit to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024 has grown into something far more powerful than a single performance.
Following that trip, we were proud to programme Why I Stuck A Flare Up My A*** for England! at Macready Theatre — a bold and unflinching piece written and performed by Alex Hill.
But what happened next went far beyond the stage.
Creating Conversations That Matter
Our post-show Q&A, featuring Alex Hill, opened the door to meaningful collaboration with organisations doing vital work in our communities. We were honoured to welcome both NHS Talking Therapies and It Takes Balls to Talk to join the discussion, shining a light on the realities of men’s mental health.
As one representative from NHS Talking Therapies shared:
“You publicly putting a spotlight on them is needed to allow us to do our jobs more effectively and efficiently.”
These conversations reinforced just how essential it is to break stigma and create safe spaces for dialogue.
Inspiring New Creative Work
The ripple effect didn’t stop there.
After attending the performance, Alex Cotton CEO of It Takes Balls to Talk was inspired to create a brand-new musical, exploring the work of street triage teams and the life-changing connections they build with people in crisis.
While we weren’t able to programme the production due to its amateur status, we proudly supported its development behind the scenes. The show went on to win an award—and more importantly, amplified awareness of the incredible work happening across Coventry and Warwickshire.
A True Reflection of Our Mission
This journey is a powerful example of our commitment at Macready Theatre “to educate and inspire.” It demonstrates how theatre can be more than entertainment—it can be a catalyst for change, connection, and community impact.
Coming Back – Bigger Than Ever
We’re thrilled to announce that Why I Stuck A Flare Up My A*** for England! returns to Macready Theatre next month, ahead of its highly anticipated West End run.
Don’t miss your chance to experience the show that’s not only entertaining audiences—but changing lives.
For almost a decade, Rugby School’s Macready Theatre has been a vibrant part of Rugby’s cultural life. Thanks to your loyalty, enthusiasm, and continued support, our auditorium has echoed with laughter, music, storytelling, and applause season after season. Today, we’re writing to share important news about the next chapter in our theatre’s story.
From July 2026 through February 2027, the theatre will temporarily close to allow for significant renovation and improvement works. These upgrades are essential to ensure the theatre remains a comfortable, inspiring, and future-ready venue for many years to come.
This investment will focus on enhancing the audience experience and improving facilities throughout the building. When we reopen in February 2027, you can look forward to a refreshed space that continues to serve as a cultural home for Rugby.
Of course, we know that Macready Theatre is far more than a building. It is a community. It is shared experiences, post-show conversations, familiar faces in the foyer, and evenings that brighten the town’s cultural calendar. With that in mind, the Macready team will not be disappearing during these months. Instead, we will be bringing selected favourite events to alternative venues across the beautiful campus of Rugby School.
We’re pleased to confirm that popular events such as Manford’s Comedy Nights will continue in a new setting, keeping high-quality live comedy firmly on Rugby’s social calendar. Our much-loved Pizza and Jazz Evenings will also return in adapted formats, bringing together great food, live music and the welcoming atmosphere you know so well.
Our programme during this period will be lighter and less frequent than usual, and we appreciate your understanding. Full details, including dates for upcoming shows and booking information, will be announced in the coming months via our website and social media channels. Keep in touch with us @macreadytheatre. We encourage you to book early, as we expect strong interest in these more intimate events.
We are incredibly grateful for your continued loyalty and support. It is thanks to you that we are able to invest in the theatre’s future with confidence. We look forward to welcoming you to our pop-up events over the coming months and to celebrating together when we reopen our doors in February 2027.
Tim Coker – Artistic Director Amie Johnson – Theatre Manager
Shakespeare on Toast author is in the hot seat as Dr Varsha Panjwani (Lecturer at NYU and Podcaster) interviews Ben Crystal on his approach to Shakespeare. Panjwani will use her insightful interview techniques, drawn from her award-winning podcast Women and Shakespeare to deep-dive into Crystal’s creative processes, where he illuminates what a trip to a Shakespeare play in 1600 would be like. Get ready to receive a master-class on the poetry style Shakespeare wrote in, a taste of original pronunciation and some critical discussions around The Bard for good measure!
This is relevant for all ages – younger people experiencing the Bard for the first time through to older audience members who love Shakespeare and want to learn something new.
Getting a Taste for The Bard Q&A with Ben Crystal and Dr Varsha Panjwani
A huge welcome to Ben Crystal and Dr Panjwani from Rugby’s Macready Theatre! To steal the opening question from Dr Panjwani’s iconic Women and Shakespeare podcast, can I first ask you both to tell me in brief when your first encounter with Shakespeare was and what was the nature of that encounter?
BC: I studied Shakespeare in school, and absolutely hated it.
VP: I saw Bollywood versions of Shakespeare’s plays and loved it!
Our audiences can look forward to more detail from both of you about your first taste of The Bard, but what else can they expect from this event?
BC: Fun. Fascination. Silliness. Heartbreak. Tragedy. And the fevered excitement of two geeks nerding out.
VP: That just about covers it! If it is not your first taste of the Bard, you might look forward to unapologetic geekery. If it is your first taste of the Bard, it will be delicious to the senses as you hear and feel Shakespeare differently.
What’s one Shakespeare myth or cliché you’re looking forward to challenging as part of your discussion?
BC: That Shakespeare needs to be made relevant somehow.
VP: That there were no women involved in Shakespeare’s theatre.
It sounds like it’s going to be a fascinating evening as part of Rugby’s Literary Festival. Can you tell me who you think this evening is really aimed at?
BC: Everyone. Grandparents bring your grandkids. Grandkids, bring your friends.
VP: Friends, Romans, countrymen, younger couples rebelling against parents, older couples with relationship drama, queer communities, shrews, party-people, innkeepers, aristocrats – Shakespeare wrote about all so any conversation about his plays is relevant to all.
Why should someone who’s not a Shakespeare fan come to this event? Or if someone’s on the fence about attending, what would you say to persuade them to join us?
BC: Having started life not being a Shakespeare fan, I understand, very much. Come anyway, you’ll have a great time. Varsha’s awesome. Plus I’ll have my therapy dog Edie with me. You never know, we might change your mind.
VP: Ben’s actually great at changing your mind! And Edie has been to so many Shakespeare events that he deserves an honorary degree. Besides these attractions though, I think that you actually don’t have to be a Shakespeare superfan to make Shakespeare work for you. We can offer some ways to do just that.
Thank you both so much for your time. One final fun question for you; Is there a quote or scene from Shakespeare that perfectly captures what this event is all about?
VP: I am picking scenes from one of my favorite plays – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – where characters tumble into the enchanted woods and come out the other side somewhat changed. It is messy and they’re questioning everything but it is also fun and surprising – just like this event promises to be!
A Q&A with Director Tim Coker on Square Pegs, Fringe Festival and all things absurd!
Eight teenagers take you back in time to an analogue age when telephones had wires and television was not so demanding. Square Pegs return with a brand-new, life-imitating-art play about growing up, which asks lots of questions about what it means to be human, but offers absolutely no answers whatsoever. Join Macready Theatre’s Offie-nominated Young Actors for 45 minutes of absurdist, fast-paced, fun-filled storytelling, to share time-travelling tales of nostalgia and a yearning for meaning when all seems fake.
C ARTS C venues | C aquila 1 -10 August 2025, 12:20 (45m)
8-BIT DREAM Writer Ben Grant Director Tim Coker
Hi Tim thank you for being part of our interview series for Edfringe 2025. How does it feel to be back at C Arts this summer with your new show 8-bit Dream?
We are really excited to be back, we have been bringing new writing to Fringe for over 10 years now as a company and this one is a lot of fun! C Arts have been our home since our first show in 2013 and we love being part of the C family, it’s a great organisation which really supports young and emerging artists.
You had an amazing run last year with Georgie Dettmer’s 3 Couples, 2 Breakups, 1 Barbie and The Berlin Wall, with Mumble Theatre calling it “A Spectacular Showcase.” What does it mean to you to get this type of recognition for a show like this?
We have had some great reviews over the past few years, and our distinctive style of quirky, absurdist, new writing with a physical twist is quite unique at Fringe, so it’s always great to see reviewers finding our work interesting and appealing.
Do nerves still set in ahead of a run like EdFringe or are you able to chill and enjoy the process?
I love every minute, and can pretty much chill, being an ‘old hand’ at Fringe now! But the company changes every couple of years, as all our actors are aged 17 and they all move on to drama school or university to continue their training after they’ve spent a year or two with us. So for the cast I think it’s exciting and yes, I’d say they are nervous, but in a good way.
What was your first fringe experience like?
It was fantastic, I commissioned a young writer Laura Neal (who is now the lead writer on the new HBO Harry Potter series) to write a play for me and we came up to C Venues with her show ’15 Minutes’ in 2013. We had Libby Purves come to the first show to review us for The Times, which was a huge deal as you can imagine, but she was really encouraging. I learned a huge amount that year, about the logistics, marketing, flyering, and how to pace yourself for a run. It was such a great experience that, well, here we are again 10+ shows later!
If you could describe what the Fringe means to you in one sentence what would you say?
For me, Fringe is the best possible platform for inspiring young talent in the world, and it’s also a brilliant way for young actors to take risks.
Can you tell me a little bit about 8-bit Dream, what was it about Ben Grant’s text that connected with you?
This show, like all of the shows I have brought to Fringe, is commissioned for a specific group of young actors. We give emerging writers the chance to create new ensemble-based work to premiere at the Fringe, which is rare. We have a clear ‘USP’ with quirky absurdist comedy, but what’s really exciting is that it is made-to-measure, rather than doing an ‘off the peg’ published play. The writer gets to hear the actors’ voices through the process so it is genuinely collaborative and echoes the young actors’ lived experiences. The show Ben has written for us this year is a fascinating commentary on how media controls young people’s lives. The show takes us back to a nostalgic time before mobile phones and ‘unplugs’ the characters in the show, though the spectre of future digital influence on their lives emerges throughout the play. It’s very interesting as it came from the cast’s genuine feelings on how they wish that they could go back to a pre-internet era, free from social media.
Due to the nature of how festivals like the Fringe run how flexible are you with the production once you start running, do you prefer to stick to the text as is or do you allow for some movement?
We are lucky that we are working with original scripts, and have a ‘direct line’ to our writers. So we can adapt and tweak as we go along and probably about 40% of the show is devised in rehearsal, away from the text itself so that allows us huge amounts of freedom to keep developing the work as we go.
What are the biggest challenges you face bringing a show like 8-bit Dream to the festival?
It’s not cheap, everyone knows that, so we have to be mindful of costs all the time. The rapid get-in and get-out timing also means you have to be very creative in the way you tell your stories theatrically. Our show this year uses 2 live cameras on stage for instance, so we have a lot of tech to manage in a 10 minute window in our get-in, which will be stressful. But that’s also what makes bringing shows to the Fringe so exciting!
How did Macready Theatre Square Pegs Young Actors’ Company come about?
I created the company in 2013 when I was working with a group of young actors who were all considering pursuing careers in the industry but lacked the experience of performing outside of the partisan environment of their school. At the same time, I was keen to find a way to give emerging and early career writers an opportunity to write a new, experimental show for us to take to Edinburgh, and for the young actors to be part of that creative process, learning from the writer and seeing close-up how writers develop treatments into fully-formed scripts. It ticked a lot of boxes and has launched a lot of actors and writers’ careers in the 12 years it’s been running.
With theatre such an indelible part of our shared cultural experience what do you think can be done to champion new, emerging writers?
This is a great question. I think new writing is one of the most important parts of the creative ecosystem. Originality is hugely important to me. I strongly believe that we need to champion the new in every creative experience, otherwise we will be stuck in a loop of dull pastiche. That’s why AI as a ‘creative’ force is limited, it can only regurgitate what it gathers from existing work. So to stay a step ahead of the machines, we need to protect the new, the imaginative leaps and unexpected happy accidents of true creativity and harness that to ensure that we value this in education, in funding, in opportunity. We co-commission between Macready Theatre and Bloomsbury Festival and this kind of collaboration is really important, sharing and supporting new writers to try to find their original voices.
What would you say have been the most valuable lessons you’ve discovered about the theatre you create since your debut production?
For me personally, it’s about problem-solving. Theatre is smoke-and-mirrors stuff. The audience experience is the most important thing, and finding creative ways to hide the clunkiness of compromise to make the illusion feel magical and alive, that’s really hard. I am still working out how to make things work and every new show is a brilliant puzzle to solve. It never gets dull.
How important is the collaborative relationship between playwright and director?
For us this is absolutely integral. Not just with me as director, but (and probably more importantly) with the ensemble as a whole. Listening, compromising, problem-solving together allows us all to meet the same endpoint, to give an audience the best possible experience within our means.
Is there any advice or tips you would offer an emerging playwright?
Be original, whatever it takes, be original and surprise yourself. Don’t do what it says on the tin. That’s boring.
And finally, what message would you like your audiences to take with them from 8-bit Dream?
That young people are conscious of the (negative) influence of social media on their lives, and look to the simpler, analogue time (the one their parents enjoyed growing up) with a degree of envy. If we understand that, then as adults we can maybe understand better the control that media has over all of us, not just young people, and that as we doom-scroll for hours ourselves, we should realise that it’s GenZ who probably have more awareness than we do about how all this information works and what to do to escape the algorithm.
Rugby School’s Macready Theatre Announces Unmissable Festive Season Line-Up!
Get ready for a spectacular sleigh ride of festive cheer as Macready Theatre unveils its dazzling festive season, featuring two unmissable productions that promise to delight audiences of all ages. From breathtaking ballet to a hilariously energetic family adventure, Macready Theatre is set to be the ultimate destination for holiday magic.
Amie Johnson, Theatre Manager, shares her excitement: “We’re absolutely thrilled to present such a magnificent festive line-up this year. We’ve got the timeless beauty of The Nutcracker, followed by the return of the riotously fun Gingerbread Man that’s guaranteed to have everyone laughing!”
First, step into an enchanting world with Kings International Ballet’s exquisite rendition of ‘The Nutcracker,’ showing from Saturday 6 December to Thursday 11 December. With breathtaking choreography, stunning costumes, and the timeless score by Tchaikovsky performed live, this beloved classical ballet is brought to life in a spectacle of grace and beauty. Follow Clara as she dreams of a magical nutcracker doll coming to life, leading her through the Land of Sweets where she encounters the Sugar Plum Fairy, the mischievous Mouse King, and the serene Snow Queen. This production promises an unforgettable experience for audiences of all ages, filled with lively dances, fantastical characters, and heartwarming moments.
Then, get ready to run, run, as fast as you can to catch Stuff & Nonsense Theatre’s uproariously funny retelling of’The Gingerbread Man,’ from Sunday 14 December until Sunday 4 January. This brilliant family show brings the delicious Gingerbread Man to life as he sets off on the journey of a lifetime! Join in his epic quest as he uses his wits to escape anyone who finds him tasty. Is he faster than a goose? Can he cross a river using a fox as a raft? Are gingerbread men allowed on trains? Stuff & Nonsense apply their usual brilliance with a captivating mix of puppetry, live action, great music, and clever humour in this exciting and pacey show. Suitable for all ages, from three to ninety-three, there are no scary bits – just don’t turn up hungry!
Secure your tickets now for a festive season filled with wonder, laughter, and spectacular performances.
Macready Theatre 