OUR PEOPLE:
Gavin Antony
Artistic Director & CEO
Gavin trained as an actor at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), where he received a scholarship to study from 1998 to 2001. After graduating he was making promising progress within the industry however, his drinking quickly escalated and in 2004 he abandoned his acting career.
By 2015, after 20 years of sustained alcohol abuse, Gavin was warned him he may only 6 months to live if he continued to drink.
His life was saved when he received government funding to spend a 24-week period in a residential rehabilitation centre in West Sussex, which carefully set him on a path to sobriety. This has now lasted nine years and whilst he has continued to rebuild his life, his recovery is still prioritised above all else.
Once in stable recovery for two years, Gavin established a small-scale immersive theatre company, and soon after directed his own addiction-based contemporary adaptation of Hamlet for various fringe festivals throughout 2018. The following year, having resecured an acting agent, he made his West End acting debut in Ian Rickson's production of Ibsen's Rosmersholm at the Duke of York's Theatre, alongside Tom Burke, Hayley Atwell, and Giles Terera.
Alongside his directing and acting work, Gavin also began teaching acting as a freelancer and in 2019 he completed a Post-Graduate Certificate in Performance Teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 2023, he graduated again, this time with a master's degree in Actor Training and Coaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Crave's Conception & ETHOS
In October 2023, having won a prestigious Enterprise Award from Central, Gavin founded Crave Theatre with a vision to create training and performance opportunities for sober actors. Drawing from his unique personal insight he formulated a concept which he believes would have been inspirational and beneficial to him on his own journey through early recovery.
His vision for the company is twofold: To provide professional actor training opportunities for those previously affected by alcoholism or substance abuse who wish to either reconnect to the art of acting or to pursue a career in acting for the first time. And to create high quality public productions that, where possible, bring fresh and authentic perspectives on the themes surrounding addiction.
By using established classical or contemporary plays as vehicles, rather than devised or directly autobiographical work, we believe that the boundaries that are provided by working within written text and character allow for safer and deeper exploration of the characters and themes of the play.
The application of psychophysical text and character-based acting methods within our training and rehearsals also helps our actors develop an improved awareness of their own impulses and compulsions. This, as well as being vital tools for anybody in recovery, will help them to build and sustain emotional awareness and resilience within their acting.
Through this challenging and courageous approach, we believe that historically damaging or cliched stereotypes about alcoholics and addicts can be erased and new narratives and perceptions can be formed. Crave Theatre also believes that our work could be vital to help build positive new pathways towards a resilience-based, recovery-informed acting approach that might benefit all actors moving forward.
OUR TRUSTEES
Christine Steele
Chris trained as an actress at The Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
She performed for several years in London's West End and in film, notably working with such theatrical luminaries as Sir John Gielgud.
In 1976 however, she left her acting career in order to seek help for her alcoholism and having found recovery has now been sober for 49 years.
In 1980 she returned to University, gaining a BA in Drama and then undertook training as a dramatherapist.
In 1985 she founded and was the director of the original addiction unit at The Priory Treatment Centre in Roehampton where she stayed for 22 years, overseeing thousands of clients follow their journey into recovery.
She currently sits on the board of trustees for Crossroads Addiction Rehabilitation Centre in Antigua.
Barry Trodd
Barry trained as a humanistic therapist in 2001, motivated by his own experience of addiction and the interventions which helped him to turn his life around. He views sustainable recovery as a holistic package of the ‘three thirds’ of the human condition - mind, body and spirit - and has brought this philosophy into his extensive work in addiction-focused settings over the last two decades, primarily in residential treatment, but also in a successful day programme in the south of England.
Barry is currently Senior Practitioner within the clinical services at Sporting Chance Clinic, where, having stepped up from session work to a full-time role when the clinic expanded in 2019, he works with clients on both longer and shorter-term residential treatments.
Daniel Hawksford
Before starting his professional acting career, Daniel trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
His work in theatre includes: Much Ado About Nothing and The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other at the National Theatre; The School of Night, The Tamer Tamed, The Taming of the Shrew and Cymbeline for the RSC; Jackets at the Young Vic, London; Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Wales; The Pull of Negative Gravity at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and 59E59, New York; Memory at ESG, New York; Aqua NeroReview of Acqua Nero from the theatre dance and drama in Wales web site for Sgript Cymru; Romeo and Juliet at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter and Lunch at The King's Head Theatre, London. He also played Malcolm in Shakespeare's Globe's production of Macbeth.
Daniel is an associate artist for Clwyd Theatr Cymru.
Dr Jessica Hartley
Jessica is Course Leader for the MA/MFA in Actor Training and Coaching at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Her PhD research questioned the ethics and tact-filled practices that are used when working with adolescent students in circus. She foreground her neurodivergency, feminism and class as a political intervention when considering radical equality within academia and conservatoire training.
She trained as a director at Central under the mentorship of Catherine Alexander, and was subsequently short-listed for the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award on four occasions between 2003-2007. Her professional experience as an associate director saw her alignment with Orla O’Loughlin (Sob, The Traverse and now Guildhall), John Wright (as ASM on Only Fools No Horses 2009) and with Jatinder Verma (educator on Journey to the West 2001-2002).
She found a permanent home at Central in 2013 working with pedagogy and risk-taking. She has worked for Portsmouth University, The University of Greenwich, Brunel University, Tara Arts, Surrey County Arts, The Why Not Institute.
She delivered the Keynote address in AusAct 2019 at Queensland University of Technology: ‘Vulnerability in a Crisis: Pedagogy, critical reflection and positionality in Actor Training ‘.
She is a Senior Fellow of the HEA.
Areas of Expertise
- Freedom and coercion in Pedagogy
- Consent and boundaries in Actor Training
- Dignity and compassion in teaching
- Risk, vulnerability, and wellbeing
- Oracy
- Phenomenology
- Clown
- Failure
- Neuroinclusivity
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