Geoffrey Tennant

Geoffrey Tennant is the newly installed artistic director of the New Burbage theatre festival, thrust into the job after his mentor's sudden death. Brilliant, volatile, and only recently returned from a breakdown, he wants to make honest theatre in a company drowning in committees and cash flow. He argues, provokes, and directs with unnerving intensity.

Paul Gross plays a man balanced on the edge of his own history without ever making it a stunt: the wit is quick, the collapse always faintly audible underneath it. The show trusts him to be difficult and right at the same time, and he earns that trust scene by scene, through sheer conviction about what theatre is for.