Professional Companies
As Theatre Makers ABOP believes Theatre performance should be thrilling, stimulating and impactful. We challenge, inspire, and awaken audiences with storytelling that is dynamic and vibrantly alive. We play an important role in provoking conversations that ignite a fiery, robust exchange of ideas that makes the theatrical experience memorable for everyone involved.
Professional theatre. Real people. No two careers quite the same.
Not every brilliant theatre-maker wants — or is able — to spend every waking hour working in the industry.
There are day jobs. Families. Other creative projects. Bills to pay. Lives to live. And sometimes, quite sensibly, you need to do something else for a bit. That doesn’t mean the theatre bug goes away. It usually just waits patiently in the wings.
ABOP and Too Close For Comfort are our professional companies, bringing together experienced theatre practitioners, performers, musicians, directors and other creative artists who want to continue making ambitious work without having to commit to the industry full-time.
Our companies work on a project-by-project basis, bringing the right people together for the right piece of work, at the right time.
Sometimes that means familiar faces returning. Sometimes it means meeting someone new. Sometimes it means discovering that the person you’ve been having coffee with for years is, rather unexpectedly, an excellent actor.
The result is a flexible professional model that allows artists to keep performing, creating and developing their practice alongside the other things that make up a life.
Making Good Work
We like theatre with a bit of ambition.
Our professional companies create and tour productions, develop new projects and work across performance, music, movement and storytelling.
We’re interested in good stories, interesting ideas and work that gives both artists and audiences something to get their teeth into.
That might mean a new production.
A collaboration.
A touring project.
A workshop.
A piece of work that starts with a question and ends somewhere none of us quite expected.
ABOP is built with reality in mind.
Theatre careers rarely follow a straight line.
Artists move in and out of projects. They work across different disciplines. They teach. They freelance. They raise families. They run businesses. They disappear for a while and then suddenly reappear because someone has mentioned a particularly tempting role.
Our professional companies offer experienced artists the opportunity to come together, make high-quality work and stay connected to the creative world — without requiring theatre to be the entirety of their lives.
Because being a professional artist isn’t always about doing it every day.
Sometimes it’s about having the opportunity to keep doing it at all.
The Right People. The Right Project. The Right Moment.
We believe good theatre starts with good people. Artists who care about the work. People who turn up, contribute, collaborate and aren’t afraid to try something. People who know their craft but still have enough curiosity to ask,
“What if we did it differently?”
Our professional companies bring those people together to create work that is ambitious, thoughtful, entertaining and, occasionally, a little bit unexpected. There will be rehearsal rooms. There will be opening nights. There will almost certainly be coffee. And there may be the occasional moment when everyone looks at each other and thinks,
“Well… this could be rather good.” That’s the moment we’re after. The lights go up. The audience arrives.
And we make the thing.
ABOP and Too Close For Comfort work on a profit-share basis — when the work does well, the people who make it happen share in that success.
