About

Phoebe von Held is a theatre adaptor/director and researcher who lives and works in London.  Her theatre projects combine the development of performance texts with directing and design conceptualisation and are often linked to theoretical research. In her adaptations, the focus is on the rewriting of mostly non-dramatic, literary texts that shed new light onto key contemporary social and political issues, opening up the medium of theatre to formal possibilities beyond the dramatic genre. In recent years, her interest has turned to Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished play fragments, written during the 1920s, when, faced with the challenges of global capitalist modernity, Brecht began to radically deconstruct the genre of drama, evoking a highly innovative, liminal, almost unstageable theatre.

Phoebe von Held’s adaptations have consistently involved new translations, conducted in a dialogical or group format, using a spoken word scenario to test the performability of a text, but also to create a polyphonic, dramaturgical ‘think tank’ that amplifies collective discussion and productive controversy. Adaptations range from close abridgements to free rewritings in which the resulting text is almost entirely new and other authors are commissioned to produce new texts (for example, Natasha Soobramanian and Luke Williams in The Manual Oracle).

Drawing on a background in contemporary dance and scenography, the visual dimension of theatre is fundamental to von Held’s directorial approach. Her projects are collaborative at all stages, not only with other artists or co-translators, but by way of creating exchanges with other professionals or specific social groups; for instance, in The Manual Oracle, she collaborated with mental health patients experiencing paranoid psychosis; D'Alembert's Dream was developed in cooperation with a group of biomedical scientists based at the National Institute of Medical Research, London (now Crick Institute). In the Breadshop Dramaturgy Lab, a process-based zoom project for a group of 30 young theatre-makers, run during the lockdowns of 2020/21, she invited 12 theatre artists and academic specialists in theatre and literary studies, economy and social sciences, to explore and re-situate Brecht’s play about capitalist crisis within our current context.

Phoebe von Held's work as an adaptor/director is accompanied by research, writing and teaching in practice- as well as theory-based subjects, including scenography, dramaturgy, theatre studies, literary studies and aesthetics. She has taught at Tate Modern, University College London, Queen Mary and Westfield College, Tate Modern, Boston University (London), Wimbledon School of Arts, and at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London. She is the author of Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht, Oxford: Legenda, 2011. Her translation of Brecht’s Fleischhacker fragment (in collaboration with Matthias Rothe) was published by Bloomsbury/Methuen in 2019. For a complete list of Publications: CLICK HERE.