Martha Watson Allpress is a writer and actor. Her plays include: Lady Dealer (Edinburgh Fringe, 2023); and Patricia Gets Ready (for a date with the man who used to hit her) (VAULT Festival, London, 2020; Edinburgh Fringe, 2021; Brixton House, 2022).

Rosemary Waugh is an award-winning art critic and journalist, specialising in theatre, dance and visual art. Her reviews, interviews and essays have been published by titles including the New Statesman, Condé Nast Traveller, The Financial Times, The i, The Evening Standard, The Independent, Time Out, The Stage, Exeunt, Artists and Illustrators, OOF, The English Garden, The Dance Gazette, The Globe and Art UK. She is also the author of an extensive collection of theatre programme notes for shows on in the West End.

She is the author of Running the Room: Conversations with Women Theatre Directors (Nick Hern Books, 2023).

Laura Wayth is Professor of Acting and Coordinator of the Actor Training Program at San Francisco State University. She has worked as an acting teacher and coach in the United States, Italy, Morocco, China and the UK, and is the author of Breaking Down Your Script: The Compact Guide (Nick Hern Books, 2023) and two other books on acting: A Field Guide to Actor Training and The Shakespeare Audition.

Mary Gladys Webb (1881–1927) was an English romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people whom she knew. Her novels, including Gone to Earth (1917) and Precious Bane (1924), are thought to have inspired the famous parody Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons.

John Webber is an actor and playwright.

As an actor he has worked at the National Theatre and in regional theatres around the UK. Television credits include EastEnders, Doctor Foster, A Touch of Frost and Coronation Street.

His plays include Spiderfly (Theatre503, London, 2019) and REAP (long-listed for the Bruntwood and Papatango Prizes, short-listed for BBC Writersroom and selected for the Arcola Theatre's PlayWROUGHT festival).

Born in c.1580, John Webster came from an evidently prosperous middle-class London family, his father a coachbuilder and wagonmaker with premises in Smithfield, just north-west of the City. The business was continued by John’s brother Edward, and perhaps helped to subsidise Webster’s playwriting career – for, by contrast with most professional dramatists, his output was scarcely sufficient to provide an adequate living. His law studies in the Middle Temple evidently incomplete, he is first heard of in the theatre from payments made to Dekker, Middleton and himself by the manager Philip Henslowe in 1602, and two years later he was entrusted with the task of fleshing out Marston’s The Malcontent, a play written for a children’s company, to meet the needs of the adult players. A number of satirical ‘citizen comedies’ of London life, written in collaboration, followed – then, around 1610, came his first known independent work, The Devil’s Law Case, written in the then-fashionable form of a tragi-comedy. Two or three years later, the two great tragedies which have sustained his reputation in the theatre followed in quick succession: but whereas The White Devil received its first performance at the Red Bull, an open-air theatre of low repute, The Duchess of Malfi was performed by Shakespeare’s old company, the King’s Men, at their prestigious indoor house, the Blackfriars – and no doubt also at the second Globe, where the company still played in the summer months. Webster’s later dramatic output was largely collaborative, with civic celebrations and occasional verse completing a modest canon. Beyond these bare facts we know little of his life – or even the exact date of his death, though his fellow playwright Thomas Heywood seems to refer to him as dead by 1634.

Max Webster is a theatre director, specialising in new work, opera and live music events.

He has directed major productions in London at The Old Vic, The Globe Theatre and English National Opera, as well as across Europe, North America and Asia. He is currently an Associate Director of the Donmar Warehouse.