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All about me...

I was raised in Borrowash, went to Friesland School in Sandiacre and moved down to London at the age of 18 to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Gareth in 'Gogol's Madman'

Before then, I’d been involved with the Central Television Workshop, which had led to me getting some little TV jobs, including work up in Belper on Peak Practice!

When I finished at drama school, I moved back to Borrowash and from there to Birmingham, where I’m still living now, and where I set up my own theatre company, Little Earthquake, in 2005.

About Little Earthquake...

Our current production is Gogol’s Madman, based on 'Diary of a Madman', a Russian short story by Nikolai Gogol which I’ve loved for years and always wanted to adapt for the stage.

We first performed the show in Birmingham in 2005 as Little Earthquake’s debut production.

I funded every bit of it myself, with money I earned from my day job working in Borders bookshop.

Gareth in 'Gogol's Madman'

The production also depended on me calling in favours from practically everybody I knew: from my mum, to make costumes; from my dad, to build the set and make the props; from my friends, to operate the lights and sound and to distribute flyers and posters.

We even had to call on help from an amateur theatre company in Walsall, who provided rehearsal space for free.

When you’re first starting out, when your budget is tiny and you have no reputation to trade on, you are completely dependent on the goodwill of other people. Without that kind of support, it’s very difficult to create your own work.

Now we’re three years down the line and we have several productions under our belt.

In 2006, we got funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England for a regional tour of Gogol’s Madman and for the development of our second production, The Premature Burial, based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe.

That funding was a major milestone in the life of my company.

The quality of our work didn’t change — however much or how little money we have, we always ensure that we produce the best work we can — but the funding meant I could afford to work with collaborators on a more professional footing, and more importantly, could pay people properly for the work they were doing.

The Madman tour took us to Hereford, to Wolverhampton, to Birmingham and right at the beginning, to Nottingham Arts Theatre, which meant a lot to me as it’s literally a stone’s throw from the old Central Television Workshop headquarters on Stoney Street.

It’s always going to be important to me that Little Earthquake’s work should be produced at venues in the East Midlands, and this is why I’m so pleased to be bringing Madman to Buxton this week.

The more work I create, the more chance it gives me to develop relationships with venues and with audiences across the region — and on a personal level, my roots are here; this is where I first got interested in acting and where I had my first opportunities to work as an actor.

'Gogol's Madman' is being performed in The Pauper's Pit at Buxton Opera House on Friday, 19th September and Saturday, 20th September. Further ticket information can be found at the Little Earthquake website.