About the Company

Macready Theatre Young Actors’ Company is an Offie-nominated youth theatre company established in 2013 by Artistic Director, Dr Tim Coker.

The Company works closely throughout the year with young actors from Rugby School, Rugby Free Secondary School, Harris Academy, Eastlands Primary and many other local schools to deliver workshop and performance opportunities for young people from all backgrounds in Macready Theatre as well as at our flagship annual Festival on The Close and further afield at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Bloomsbury Festival and National Theatre Connections Festival.

One important part of our output is our two youth groups, Square Pegs and Rugby Connected Youth Theatre. Our focus with both groups is on new writing and we regularly commission new work. These opportunities attract talented young people from all backgrounds to join the company and offers them the chance to develop new work with professional writers, directors, choreographers, musicians, producers and technicians. Generous financial support is available for those who need it in order to widen access to the programme. Many of our older company members join Rugby School in the Sixth Form with bursary and scholarship support to enable them to access our unique pathway into the industry; combining a first-class education with outstanding training and performance opportunities. For more information on our scholarship programme, please email tim@macreadytheatre.co.uk.

Each year, our senior touring ensemble Square Pegs works in partnership with London’s Bloomsbury Festival to co-commission emerging writers to develop a brand-new play for the Edinburgh Fringe and Bloomsbury Festivals each year, whilst our younger members take part in National Theatre Connections or Coram Shakespeare Schools Festivals as part of Rugby Connected Youth Theatre in partnership with Rugby Free Secondary School.

2026 Production

Macready Theatre Young Actors’ Company presents
A Square Pegs Production
1. Empty Sky by Maddie Wakeling

Writer: Maddie Wakeling https://www.maddiewakeling.co.uk
Director: Tim Coker https://timcoker.co.uk
Movement Director: Florrie Harris
Original Music: Finn Coker
Technician: Kyle Arrowsmith

The Company: Tae Ballantyne, Freddy Cawdron, Dan Faulkner, Josephine Lloyd, Francesca Odueyungbo, Isabel Riall, Harnek Sahota, Sammy Wakayu

‘1. an empty sky; 2. a girl, missing; 3. a community of collectors; 4. a past, forgotten…’

Square Pegs are back with to a brand-new play about memories, tape recordings and the stories we tell to make sense of the impossible. Through unexpected interviews, forgotten fragments and half remembered truths, a town tries to understand an event no one can fully explain. Expect fast-paced, fun-filled ensemble storytelling delivered in Square Pegs’ characteristically sharp, simple and brilliantly absurd style.

‘Unlike anything I’ve ever seen’ **** (NorthWestEnd.com)

7-16 August at 1pm (45m)
C Venues: C Aquila, Edinburgh

Tickets available here

Director’s Note

This year’s show feels like a slight shift in style compared to some of our recent work. Whilst it retains the quirkiness of our signature style – it’s as strange, as absurd in many ways as our other shows – Maddie’s play has a more subtle political dimension which has driven our approach to rehearsal.

There is a key question in the play: was a child abducted by an eagle? Maddie’s script is wonderfully open and offers no definitive answer to that question. There are no character names, and each scene is a vignette. This ambiguity gave us as a company a whole world of possible meanings to explore and what we’ve made out of this – part scripted, part devised – is a play about building walls. It’s about a once-proud rural community which has lost its industries, lost its sense of worth, which has become paranoid, fearful of outsiders, fearful of change. A community who – when confronted with the inevitable struggle that periods of austerity bring – invent a narrative to preserve their lifestyle, their safe way of existing in their small world. They create a tragedy, an abduction story. They invent both victim and perpetrator, and their scapegoat is a whole species, blamed for the alleged tragedy that has befallen their town. Thus the community arrive at a solution to their problems: to wipe out that species. A genocidal purge to right wrongs, to preserve their way of living and to rid them of the fearful ‘other’ who threatens their very sense of self. They believe the problem is solved by their action. Until two peculiar strangers appear in the town.

As a play about xenophobia, about how easily an invented story becomes truth, about how ordinary people slide towards extremism when their livelihoods are threatened – this is a story for and about our time.

2025 Production

Macready Theatre Young Actors’ Company presents
A Square Pegs Production
8-bit Dream by Ben Grant

Writer: Ben Grant
Director: Tim Coker
Movement Director: Ellen Finlay
Technician: Kyle Arrowsmith

Eight teenagers take you back in time to an analogue age when telephones had wires and television was not so demanding. Square Pegs are back 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 story-telling as we share time-travelling tales of nostalgia and a yearning for meaning when all around seems fake.

‘A short spectacular showcase’ ***** (Mumble Theatre)
‘Another joyous bag of wild imagination, comedy and physicality’ **** (Broadway Baby)

1-10 August at 12:20 (45m)
C Venues: C Aquila, Edinburgh

Tickets available here

2024 Production

Macready Theatre Young Actors’ Company presents
A Square Pegs Production
3 Couples, 2 Breakups, 1 Barbie and The Berlin Wall
by Georgie Dettmer

Seven teenagers (and a Barbie doll) invite you to a joyfully absurd play about love – in all its weird and wonderful forms. Square Pegs ask lots of questions about what it means to be human in their life-imitating-art play about growing up and in its own inimitable, absurdist fashion, offer absolutely no answers whatsoever! Offie-nominated Macready Theatre Young Actors share tales of breakups, heartache and what it’s like to fall in love with the Berlin Wall with fast-paced, fun-filled story-telling. ‘A short spectacular showcase’ ***** (MumbleTheatre.net). ‘Joyous’ **** (BroadwayBaby.com)

The play was created following a series of initial workshops between the actors and writer, Georgie Dettmer; the script going through a 3 month R&D process with the cast before being finalised for rehearsal in March 2024. It is therefore entirely bespoke and has the voices of the young people for whom it was written woven into the writing.

The stories in the play are either true, or are based on real-life experiences.

To watch the full interview with Eija-Riitta Eklöf please follow this link: https://youtu.be/Li4TzZGrQQA?si=IvKX6bykumPSHIGE

1-10 August at 12:55
C Venues: Aquila, Edinburgh

Tickets available here

2023 Production

Macready Theatre Young Actors’ Company presents
A Square Pegs Production
2nd Picture of Dorian Gray
by Vyte Garriga

Nine teenagers, one baritone saxopone and an accordian invite you to a surreal cabaret of a play about trying to find yourself in a unfathomable universe. This life-imitating-art comedy asks lots of important questions about what it means to be human and, in fine absurdist fashion, offers absolutely no answers whatsoever.

3-12 August at 15:50
C Venues: Aquila, Edinburgh
Tickets available here.

Past Productions

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Recent workshops and masterclasses include: Vyte Garriga, Christopher Haydon; Joanna Riding; Josh Dylan, Waring & McKenna Agents; Motionhouse; Gecko; Wildcard; Stomp; Bloomsbury Festival; RADA; LIPA.

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For more information about scholarship opportunities please contact Tim Coker, Artistic Director tim@macreadytheatre.co.uk  

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