Who are Pentabus?

The nation's rural theatre is now on Substack. This is us saying hello.

Jerome Yates in Driftwood by Tim Foley, co-produced with ThickSkin. Photo credit Andrew Billington.

We’re the nation’s rural theatre. Led by our BAFTA-winning Artistic Director Elle While, we take rural stories from our Shropshire base to village halls, towns, and cities around the UK and beyond, working with the most exciting contemporary writers.

We’re on Substack to give you a deep dive behind the scenes of our productions, sharing the life of a new-writing theatre, our work with young people, emerging writers, and communities, as well as reflections from our fifty-year history.

This Substack is run by Tom Powell, Associate Artist and former Clive Richards Foundation Writer in Residence at Pentabus (2020/21), but there’ll be posts from across the Pentabus team and our freelancers.

Initially we’ll be looking at Even More… Ghost Stories by Candlelight, written by Florence Espeut-Nickless, Simon Longman, Anne Odeke, and Rosa Torr, a co-production with HighTide, that tours the East and West of England, and London, between 6th October and 8th November.

Click for more info on Ghost Stories.

You can find us elsewhere online on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, and LinkedIn, and at Pentabus.co.uk.

Here’s us a workshop at Coleham Primary School in Shropshire earlier this year, when we made Gwendol: A Giant Problem. We worked with 180 KS2 students across the country and former Pentabus Film 4/Peggy Ramsey Writer-in-Residence Henry Madd to bring the local folktale about the giant and the quick-thinking cobbler to life.