When Scott Graham, then a student at Swansea University, saw Volcano Theatre Company’s early 1990s production of Christopher Hampton’s Savages the scales fell from his eyes. “I had no idea that theatre could be that physical and that alive” he says. “I wanted to devour it”. That experience sowed the seed for the emergence of the Frantic Assembly which he co-founded in 1994 with Stephen Hoggett and Vicki Middleton.
“We’d already taken a couple of shows to Edinburgh. Above all we which, by then, had been around for 48 years. Ours was a new take and we took risks with it but there was no disrespect. It was simply that, by the 1990s, the play, once so angry, had become part of a canon and we wanted to reignite the fire. Ironically John Osborne, aged 75, died during the tour.”
