29th Arts & Business Awards

Ogilvy Arts & Business Creativity Award

BAA Edinburgh with Grid Iron

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID

Grid Iron is not for those who expect a traditional night at the theatre with a drink in the interval and queues for the toilets.  Over the years they have performed in haunted vaults, a cancer hospital and playgrounds.  “That the unexpected will happen is a given,” says company producer Judith Doherty.

The Edinburgh-based theatre company is this year’s winner of the Arts & Business Creativity Award, based on a reputation for innovative and different work over the last eleven years, which has seen them perform all over the world.

“We are a new writing company first and foremost and we’ve become well known for site-specific work,” says Jude Doherty, who has run Grid Iron with co-artistic director Ben Harris since they met at Edinburgh University.

Audiences can expect the unexpected.  “We’ve done a lot of things underground,” she says.  “Under the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, in the Old City Morgue in Cork.  In Beirut in the General Security building where we adapted the show into Arabic.  We did the same thing in a working cancer hospital in Jordan, which brought its own challenges – we had to be very sensitive and responsible.

Sometimes they are able to transfer a piece to a very different venue.  The Devil’s Larder in the Cork Morgue, for example, was also performed in Debenhams on Princes Street.

Grid Iron’s next project is Once upon a Dragon, a fairytale woodland adventure which will be part of the Edinburgh International Childrens’ Festival in May.  “We’ve done work for teenagers but this is for children aged five upwards.  A hundred children in a forest.  Oh my God.”

Mark Brown