Blue Now Creative Team and Cast

Creative Team

Neil Bartlett

Neil's performance work includes pieces for the National Theatre (IN EXTREMIS, OR YOU COULD KISS ME), the Glasgow Citizens ( NEIL BARTLETT READS) , The Abbey in Dublin (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY) and the Manchester Royal Exchange (TWENTY FOUR HOURS OF PEACE, EVERYBODY LOVES A WINNER). Most recently, he provided the script for Emma Corrin’s re-incarnation of Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO in the West End of London. His books include the novels READY TO CATCH HIM SHOULD HE FALL, THE DISAPPEARANCE BOY and  ADDRESS BOOK. In 2018, he wrote the introduction for the paperwork re-issue of Derek Jarman’s final volume of diaries,  SMILING IN SLOW MOTION. www.neil-bartlett.com

Simon Fisher Turner

Simon is renowned for his film soundtrack work which started with Derek Jarman, for whom he scored many feature films - from Caravaggio (1986), through to Jarman’s final work Blue (1993). Caravaggio (1986) began a long relationship with the BFI, and more recently Fisher Turner composed the score for restorations of three silent films, Un Chant D’Amour dir Jean Genet (1950), The Great White Silence dir Herbert Ponting (1924) and The Epic of Everest dir. Captain John Noel (1924), winning a prestigious Ivor Novello Award for the soundtrack to The Epic of Everest. He has also composed film music for Mike Hodges, Michael Almareyda, Isao Yamada. His various collaborators over the years include, Ruicki Sakamoto, Gina Birch, Deux Filles, The Derek Jarman Lab, and The Elysian Collective.

With a career as varied and diverse as his current projects, Simon Fisher Turner began as a young actor in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and in between then and now has released records under his own name and as The King Of Luxembourg and Deux Filles.

Lucy Railton

Lucy is a British cellist and composer whose work bridges experimental electronic and electroacoustic practices with the conventions of new music. As a composer-performer, her work often employs a deep consideration of sound and its properties, implementing an array of sound sources—cello and antiquated string instruments, analog and digital synthesizers, drum machines and voice—and explores alternate tuning systems, psychoacoustic phenomena, and timbral control. She has performed in a variety of contexts since graduating from the Royal Academy of Music in 2008: composed for installations at the Tate Modern and the ICA, collaborated with electronic producers Peter Zinovieff and Beatrice Dillon, interpreted solo and chamber music works by Morton Feldman, Iannis Xenakis, and Catherine Lamb, and appeared on recordings by Ellen Arkbro, Laurel Halo, and many others. She currently performs with Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, and Stephen O’Malley and Kali Malone.

Cast

Travis Alabanza

Travis is a writer, performer and theatre-maker from Bristol whose writing, performance and public discourse centres on trans and Black identities. Travis has written, toured and performed in numerous highly-regarded shows and is currently developing projects for screen. Their debut book, “None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary” was published in 2022. In 2023, Alabanza was part of BLUE NOW, a series of live performances of Derek Jarman's seminal film “Blue”.

Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard (FRSL, FRSA) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in social histories. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge. Recent work includes My Name is My Own, a physical performance piece in response to June Jordan premiered at Southbank Centre’s Poetry International, Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise, Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation at the Serpentine pavilion, and Complicity, a pamphlet based on the collection at the Tate. Jay was a 2022-2023 DAAD literature fellow in Berlin.

Joelle Taylor

Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet was published by Riverrun in Spring of 2024 and was named Guardian Book of the Month. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honoured with a DIVA Award for Excellence and was also included in the Independent’s 2024 Pride Power list.

Julie Hesmondhalgh

Theatre credits include: Punch (Nottingham Playhouse); The Jungle (St Ann's Warehouse New York); The Greatest Play in the History of the World (Trafalgar Studios and National Tour); The Report with Lemn Sissay (Royal Court); Mother Courage and Her Children, The Almighty Sometimes, Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster, Blindsided (Manchester Royal Exchange); Wit (Manchester Royal Exchange - winner of Best Female Performer 2017 MTAs); There Are No Beginnings (Leeds Playhouse); God Bless the Child (Royal Court).

Television credits include: Alma's Not Normal; Mr Bates vs the Post Office; You & Me; The Pact; The A Word; The Trouble with Maggie Cole; Dr Who; Catastrophe; Broadchurch (BAFTA-nomination for Best Supporting Actress); Happy Valley; Black Roses (BBC4 - Royal Television Society Best Actress 2014); Moving On; Inside No 9; Cucumber; Hayley Cropper in Coronation Street 1998-2014 (National TV Award 2014, Royal Television Society Award 2013).

Writing: An Actor's Alphabet (NHB); A Working Diary (Methuen); These I Love, a one woman show.

Julie co-runs Take Back theatre company in Manchester and the fundraising group, 500 Acts of Kindness. She is a supporter of Arts Emergency