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A Play in a Week really stretched me as an actor. I feel I have a deeper knowledge of myself and my approach to the profession.  Thank you fellow actors for sharing yourselves and jumping into the work fully. It was an experience worth living for!                                                                          Lorenzo Galli, theatre participant 2025, Italy

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A wonderful experience. You quickly grow together as a group and the tutors bring out the absolute best in you in rehearsals.                                  Hannah Diana Ringel, theatre participant 2025, Germany

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Application & Auditions - Fees & Scholarships

Applicants should provide a full cv, detailing training and experience. This can be uploaded onto the booking form in pdf format or sent with a covering letter via email: Theatre.Chateau.Daix@gmail.com

The first series of auditions will be via Zoom in April. Full details of the audition requirements will be sent on application, along with details of the play to be performed.

Details of fees and scholarsips can be found on the Courses page.

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The Musicality of Acting - rhythm, tone, pitch

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it, trippingly on the tongue – Hamlet

Just as a pianist can parallel the role of actor – music as speech, musical structure as narrative – so an actor can experience the musicality of language, the vitality of meaning imparted by rhythm and timbre. In intensive daily workshops for actors, and master classes for pianists, these fundamentals of craft and artistry are explored in the moment. 

If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you wish is for a play to be heard, then you must conjure its sounds from it – Peter Brook

It is an experience I am immensely grateful for. It's very hard to put into words in a way that captures the poetry of the place and the people. Oliver Skudder, theatre participant 2024, South Africa

Oliver Bennett

Oliver, writer, actor and director, received his training at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. He has worked in film, theatre and television for many years. His first full-length play Europe After the Rain was winner of the Mercury Playwright Award and shortlisted for Out Of Joint’s WiT Award and the Papatango Playwright Award. It was produced at the Mercury Theatre in April 2018 and described as a “feverish, fiercely relevant satire...a highly promising debut” and “a darkly surreal, highly theatrical exploration of the world we live in now” (The Stage). It has since been translated into Russian, and in 2020 was performed at the Goethe Institute.

In 2018, with director Vladimir Shcherban, Oliver set up HUNCHtheatre with the aim of mixing European and British theatre aesthetics and practices. Their celebrated production of Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time was performed at the Edinburgh Festival, London's Arcola, and at theatres in St Petersburg, Cologne and Mogliev. The play was listed as one of the best pieces of theatre of 2018 by Broadway World, hailed as “a vision of what theatre should be” (The Spectator), and “a blistering feat of storytelling” (The Stage). Oliver's acclaimed one man show Pass the Hat played in London's West End in 2022 and again in 2024.

Oliver recently ran a six-week playwriting course in London with The Base Creates.

Florence Roberts

Florence trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She has since worked extensively across theatre, screen and radio. Notable theatre credits include critically-acclaimed The Forsyte Saga at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Losing Venice & French Without Tears at the Orange Tree Theatre, BU21 at Trafalgar Studios and Shakespeare In Love at the Noel Coward Theatre. She was nominated in the Off-West-End Awards for Best Female Performance for her role in Punts at Theatre 503. In 2019, she performed in St. Petersburg and Cologne with HUNCHtheatre in their acclaimed production of A Hero Of Our Time (soon to be revived at Stone Nest in London’s West End). 

TV & film credits include Miss Scarlet & The Duke (PBS/Alibi); Sheep; Holby City (BBC); Dan? (Winner Raindance Film Festival Shorts); The Lost Scot and Silent Night.

As a writer Florence’s short film Getting To Know You, in which she also stars, was recently selected as Semi-Finalist at the BIFA-qualifying film festival Kino, and premiered on NoBudge, a platform for emerging filmmakers in Los Angeles.

In 2023 she guest-featured for In A Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild in Oregon, U.S., reading poetry and prose alongside pianist Hunter Noack. She has also read for Words & Music and Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3. 

Florence recently completed a Masters degree at Birkeck, London, in Classical Civilisation, with distinction. 

 

 

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Grace Andrews

Grace Andrews trained as an actor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. Acting credits include: The Forbidden Zone (Schaubühne), Peer Gynt (LSO), Tomorrow I Was Always a Lion (Belarus Free Theatre), The Winter’s Tale (Cheek by Jowl), Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet (Actors from the London Stage), and Macbeth (Sophie Fiennes/Cheek by Jowl). 

Her international teaching includes work at Fontainebleau School of Acting (where she is currently Head of Programmes and Practice), Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Mountview, Ensatt L’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théatre (Lyon), and Prima del Teatro (Pisa). As an Acting Tutor she holds an MA in Actor Training and Coaching from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research investigates the tension between safe space and identity in effective actor training.

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Grace Andrews at Fontainebleau School of Acting

Some of my bravest, most honest, and raw work happened with Grace Andrew's  guidance  – Faith Alibi, student (Guildhall School of Music & Drama)

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