The Old Homepage, Directing, Writing, Interactive Immersive & About Pages

I recently did an update of my website, and therefore have updated my website.

Which means that, in line with my archival tradition, the old text for major pages gets to go here. One day, I shall be free of my historical training.

Homepage

Hello!

Welcome to my website where you can find out about my work as a writer and director. I'm passionate about making work that draws on classic forms and contemporary ideas to create art that speaks to its audience.

My work typically combines different forms, often including opera in some way. I am influenced by various kinds of through-sung drama, including Noh theatre and musical theatre. I also enjoy working with improvisation, interactivity, and game-based theatre.

At the moment, I'm often thinking about bargains, corruption, and eldritch rituals as a way to consider larger forces in our world, while continuing my ongoing love of comedy and heightened dramatic forms and styles from Shakespeare and Noh theatre to horror and sci-fi.

I have won an 2025 Offie Assessors' Choice Award, been a finalist for the 2022 JMK Award, and been awarded residencies by Theatre Deli and the Britten Pears Foundation, while my ​past work has been praised for its "punchy, energetic staging" (Opera Magazine) and for being "one of the best immersive experiences we've ever done" (Immersive Rumours). It's been presented at the Royal Opera House, Scottish Opera, and the Grimeborn Festival, among others.

Directing

I have loved theatre and opera since I was a child, and started directing as soon as I had the chance, working on classic, new, and filmed operas, Shakespeare, new plays, drag fusion shows, sketch, improv, and standup comedy, and cabarets written by victims of the Holocaust.

I’ve had the pleasure of working on productions at the Bloomsbury Theatre, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Grimeborn, as well as training at the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. My work has been given the Offie Award's Assessor's Choice, nominated for an Offie Award and a finalist for the JMK Award.

I used to struggle to define my 'style', and I still believe that every piece deserves its own approach. But a few things are starting to become common:

1. Start with the world. By picking out the themes of a show, what it says, and identifying what its roles need to make sense - a code of honour, strict social rules, for magic to be real - you can build a world for performers and collaborators to thrive in and be creative with.

2. A grand scale: roles tend to be broad archetypes, not detailed studies in psychology. Especially in opera, that approach allows larger-than-human characters who can magnify different aspects of humanity. But, being honest, this attitude is more rooted in my starting out in comedy.

3. Use of space: I really like productions that use space to help them build the world. Sometimes this is ensuring the production moves from setpiece to setpiece, though more usually it's looking at a venue and thinking 'how can we bring the audience into this world?'

4. It has to be live. It's really easy to film stuff nowadays, and usually cheaper - so one of my core rules is that anything onstage has to be a truly live experience. That might be due to interactivity, use of space, or any number of other things. But it should feel 'live', and be impossible or near-impossible to film in a way to convey the experience of being there.

But the subtext to the question 'what sort of productions do you do' is always ‘do you do, y’know, those weird productions?’

To which I have to answer ‘sometimes’. This is because of strand 5:

5. It has to do something for the audience.

I always want the work to work for my audience today, not the composer’s centuries ago. Sometimes that does mean modernising and reworking a well-known piece, or doing abstract, conceptual work that will move them, even if they don’t understand why. But it can also mean doing a period production on a tight budget, or a slapstick comedy about a camel.

If I'm using a strange language for the production, I'll be sure to teach it to the audience in the first few scenes. But it will always be in a language that they can understand, or learn quickly. Because if only I can understand it, why would I go to all the effort of sharing a piece of work with them?

Every show's different, so my work’s always going to be different. Take a look at the productions below, and see what you think.

If you're interested in my approach, I wrote a few blogs about it here.

Writing

I started writing sketch comedy at university, quickly moving into writing opera libretti, plays, and other things. My writing has been performed by the Royal Opera House and Scottish Opera, and in the UK, Germany, Canada, and the USA, with subjects ranging from environmental catastrophe to abstract electronic texts to Macbeth's affair with a pantomime camel. I have also translated operas from German, Italian, and Icelandic.

My work has won the Saga Forge Scribe competition, been nominated for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, and shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship, the Karl Kraus Award, and the London Student Drama Festival.

What’s my process like?

I spend a long time finding the best form to explore the piece’s core ideas. I believe that a work's subject matter isn’t just explored through the events onstage, but how those events are presented. A piece about the countryside shouldn’t have the same sense of time as a play about the city, and a piece about the internet shouldn’t only show the meatspace material world. An opera should always have a clear answer to "Why are they singing? Why is this an opera, not a play or novel?"

It turns out that most things about theatre are choices - people can play multiple characters, or speak an imaginary language, or not talk at all. Given infinite freedom, asking ‘what’s this actually about?’ is my favourite way to narrow those infinite choices down to something manageable and fun.

This means I have to find a unique style for each work, to suit the answer to that question. From there, I can build a world. It also means I spend a lot of time talking to the composer, making sure that my words will fit their musical style and vice-versa.

In short, my process is teamwork, philosophy, plus ‘this bit sounds beautiful; I don’t know why’.

Games & Interactive

Since 2020, I have been working as a game designer, with a particular interest in interactive theatre and playing as a way to build communities between the players. This work has included my own interactive work, such as The Uncanny Things Trilogy, and work with others, such as my work as Associate Creative Director on The Key of Dreams.

To me, the delight of play is that, with the right rules, you can guide people to experience something they'd never encounter otherwise. Whether that's Come Bargain's rituals, inviting people to consider how they relate to one another and the world, or my interactive novel Archive From Another World letting people examine different forms of history. Above all, interactive theatre's invitation to play together excites me, and I am looking forward to future projects.

About

I am a mixed-race (British Pakistani/White British) director and writer, mainly working in opera and comedy. I studied History at UCL, and Opera Making at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. My work has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Scottish Opera, Grimeborn Festival and Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, in addition to performances in the Canada, the USA, and Germany.

I have previously directed operas including Come Bargain With Uncanny Things (2021, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, 2022, COLAB Tavern), a new interactive opera, Don Jo!, a cabaret 'cover version' of Mozart's Don Giovanni (2019, Grimeborn Festival), and Kurt Weill's The Tsar Wants His Photograph Taken (2016 and 2019, Bloomsbury Theatre). I am Artistic Director of Virtually Opera, experimenting with fusion opera since 2016. I also directed the staged concerts Schiller: The Operas (2017), Gazing in, Gazing Out (2017) and Lieder, Leaders, & Lovers (2017).

Outside of opera, I have particularly enjoyed directing Shakespeare's Macbeth (2020-2021) and Anthony and Cleopatra (2019) for the York Shakespeare Project. I frequently work with academics at UCL Hebrew and Jewish Studies, curating the Festival of Early Jewish Cinema  in 2023. and directing cabarets written by inmates of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

I also work as a writer and librettist. My operas include Come Bargain With Uncanny Things (2021, 2022), We Sing/I Sang (2020), The Perfect Opera (2018), and The Left Fang (2017). I also adapted Pagliacci for the Royal Opera House's Opera Dots series. My other writing includes A War Game (2017) and the clown play A Speaks, which was part of the Hotbed Festival at Camden People’s Theatre. I also work as a translator, most recently translating The Tsar Wants His Photograph Taken for its Scottish premiere at Scottish Opera.

My research interests include international through-sung drama and cinematically-filmed opera. I also frequently work with academic composers to create pieces relating to their research interests.

When not directing or writing, Leo can be found marketing for fringe arts companies, creating TTRPGs (including the award winning Beckett's Tavern), and Tweeting @LeoDoulton or Facebooking at www.facebook.com/LeoDoultonOfficial/).