Before training as an actor at RADA, Steve took a degree in English Language and Literature at Newcastle University subsequently training and then working as a secondary, TEFL and FE teacher.
After drama school, he worked as a theatre actor in leading roles with companies and Theatres such as Joint Stock, the Young Vic, Stratford East, The Half Moon, York Theatre Royal, The Bush, Oxford Playhouse, Contact Theatre Manchester and the Crucible, Sheffield.
He was also fortunate to work with such outstanding practitioners as Katie Mitchell, Danny Boyle, Ljubisa Ristic, Stephen Daldry, Mike Bradwell, Ekkehard Schall, Di Trevis, Bill Gaskill, Mladen Materic and Vanessa and Corin Redgrave.
Alongside his acting work he soon began to design, offer and deliver workshops in acting and performance at The Actors’ Centre, Middlesex and London Metropolitan Universities, Rose Bruford, RADA, Mountview and, more recently, for the Fourth Monkey theatre company.
He has a passionate and continuing interest in the work and ideas of Bertholt Brecht
STEPHEN TILLER
He has also worked delivering workshops in Uganda, Lebanon, Bosnia, Serbia, Holland, Japan and Palestine, notably in Gaza only weeks after the 2014 IDF attack which killed over two thousand people, of which 1500 were civilians and 500 of those children. Steve went again in 2015 for a much longer and in-depth encounter, again with the Ayaam al Masrah Theatre Company in Gaza City.Steve also started directing and writing theatre shows and set up The Wedding Collective Theatre Company in the late 90’s. As the work continued it became less and less dependent on the management of theatre buildings to put on the work and instead became drawn to site-specific performance. The most conspicuous example of this was his show Warcrime. Written at the turn of the millennium, it was based on events surrounding the death of a waitress in a café-bar in Nis in Serbia during the NATO cluster-bombing of that city.
Originally performed in the crypt of St Andrews Church in Holborn, it opened four days after the invasion of Iraq on March 20th 2003. This was not co-incidence. Steve had heard, with regard to the drumbeat for war, a BBC journalist say, rather flippantly, six months or more before: “If you were thinking of booking your holiday in Iraq in March next year, think again’.
Everything then focussed on a performance, and a venue, that would offer a mirror up to the madness that was about to unfold. If fact, rehearsals were often disrupted by events in the street. School kids in hundreds and thousands marching out of their East End classrooms, past our rehearsals at St Andrews and into the West End to protest the coming war. The huge February 15th Demo in London with which rehearsal began.
The show was a huge success, got fabulous notices and came to the attention of the Arts Council. The upshot was their funding a national tour of site-specific venues that we researched visited and prepared, including a derelict mill in Bradford, the North Tower of the Tyne Bridge, a vault in Bristol and the weapons store of an ex-US bomber base in Suffolk.
The stage was now set for more of this work in which the audience could engage with the performance at close range. And which Steve’s work with opera has taken to another level.