Tinuke Craig is an appalling actor. At least, that’s what she tells me of her brief experience on stage before she was installed safely in the director’s seat, calling the shots, where she always wanted to be. “When you’re a teenager, that’s kind of the only way you can get involved,” she laughs. “You can’t really walk into a room and be like, ‘I’m gonna direct this.’ But the main thing I took from being on the other side is just thinking, ‘Wow, I’m really terrible.’”
Thankfully, those days of South London Youth Theatre performances are far behind her. Since then, 34-year-old Craig has directed a wide range of stage productions around the UK, including the musical of The Color Purple (an adaptation based on Alice Walker’s book and the 1985 film, which is set to become a film in its own right), as well as Mike Bartlett’s Vassa (a comic update of Maxim Gorky’s 1910 original) and a pantomime version of Cinderella at Lyric Hammersmith.
