Patrick Connellan
Patrick has previously won the Linbury Prize for Stage Design and a Prague Quadriennale Gold Medal. Patrick was Course Leader for Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent University and is now a lecturer at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
Theatre credits include: Beauty and the Beast Co-Designer, Theatre by the Lake Keswick; We’ll Live and Die in These Towns Belgrade Theatre; Read All About It – City Final Co-Designer, Belgrade Theatre site-specific production in Coventry Evening Telegraph building; Whisky Galore Oldham Coliseum and national tour; A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Gaul Hull Truck Theatre; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Perm, Russia; The Red Lion Olivier Award nominated. Live Theatre, Newcastle and Trafalgar Studios, London; Iris Live Theatre, Newcastle; The Father Oldham Coliseum and Harrogate Theatre; The Baraem Play Al Jazeera Media, Qatar; The Hook Theatre Royal, Northampton and Liverpool Everyman; The Ladykillers New Vic/Hull/Stephen Joseph; One Night in November, The Rink, Belgrade Theatre; This Lime Tree Bower as Director and Designer, Edinburgh Festival; The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice and Into The Woods nominated for TMA Best Musical Award, Derby Theatre/Playhouse; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Price, Ghosts, All My Sons, Popcorn also Director, Octagon, Bolton; Edward III RSC/West End; A Passionate Woman, Misery West End; The Slight Witch National Theatre/ Birmingham Rep; Abigail’s Party also Director; Copenhagen and Alphabetical Order New Vic, Stoke, and for Hampstead Theatre; Amongst Friends, Life After Scandal also Plymouth; Taking Care of Baby also Birmingham Rep, Nathan the Wise and When the Night Begins.
Image credit: Manuel Harlan
Featured Work
The Hook
The Hook was originally a screenplay written by Arthur Miller but never made. It was effectively banned by the FBI for being too pro-Communist during the period of the Korean War and by the constraints of the McCarthy witch hunt.
Miller’s collaborator, Elia Kazan, effectively took the idea and went on to make On the Waterfront. I discovered the screenplay in an archive some twenty years ago and eventually persuaded James Dacre to produce it as a stage play. The play is based on the true story of Peter Panto, a militant longshoreman who took on the mafia-ridden longshoremen’s union led by the corrupt Joseph Ryan. It is a story of the struggle for justice by brave longshoremen in the 1940s working in Red Hook, New York
