Training and performing
I trained at Italia Conti, one of the oldest performing arts schools in the country, and I started where most performers start: auditioning, and taking the work that came. I played Sophie in Mamma Mia in Portugal and Spain. I ran my own cabaret show. I was the Fairy in Cinderella, and pantomime is something anybody who has done it will tell you is the hardest and most useful training there is. There was a featured part in a Lloyds TSB commercial. And there were board engagements, singing to rooms that had not necessarily come to hear a singer.
None of that made me famous and it was never going to. What it did was teach me the working reality of the job, which is the part nobody puts in a prospectus: how to warm up properly in a cold room, how to sing eight shows a week without losing your voice by Thursday, how to walk into an audition you know you are wrong for and do it well anyway.
I still perform. I take cabaret and musical theatre bookings when the diary allows, and this Christmas I am playing Emily Hobbs in Elf the Musical in Tunbridge Wells. It is not a professional production and I would not pretend otherwise, but it is genuinely exciting to be back on stage after a while away. That matters for the teaching as much as for me: a teacher who has not stood in front of an audience for a decade is teaching from memory.
Teaching, and why it became the main thing
I have been teaching singing for over ten years and it is now the largest part of my week: around eighty students, from complete beginners to performers preparing for drama school auditions and professional contracts. Some are seven years old. Some are adults who were told at school that they could not sing and have believed it ever since. Some are in Bromley and some are on the other side of the world on a video call.
I prepare students for both ABRSM and MTB graded exams, and I am Vocal Health first aid trained, which matters more than it sounds. A voice pushed badly for a year is a voice you spend three years repairing, and a great deal of what I do in a first lesson is undoing habits somebody picked up trying to sound like a recording.
The technical work is breath, tone, range and control. The harder work, and the part that actually changes people, is learning to use your voice in front of another human being without apologising for it.
Running a school, producing and directing
I was principal of Make Believe Bromley and Make Believe Sevenoaks, two schools within the same franchise, and I successfully sold them both on. Running a school teaches you things performing never does: how a class of thirty children with wildly different confidence levels can all be moved forward in the same hour, how to build a programme rather than a lesson, and how much of this industry is administration done well or done badly.
I have also produced and directed, including Star Quality at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley. Directing taught me to be specific. "That was lovely" helps nobody. "You dropped the end of that line because you were already thinking about the next one" is something a performer can act on.
The other side of the table
I have worked as a casting professional and in theatre PR and marketing, and in 2018 I founded KTTA, a boutique talent agency for young performers. The agency is deliberately small so that every performer on the books gets managed rather than simply listed, and its clients have worked in the West End, on tour, and in television and film.
Being an agent changed how I teach. You watch hundreds of self-tapes and you start to see, very quickly, the difference between a young performer who has been trained and one who has been flattered. You also see how much of the outcome has nothing to do with talent: the height, the age, the look the production had in mind before anyone walked in. That is a hard thing to explain to a fifteen year old, and it is one of the more important things I do.
Writing the book
I wrote The Future Performer, a handbook for parents, because the same questions kept arriving from families who had been given confident advice by people with something to sell. Is my child ready for an agency. Should we be paying for this. What does a good drama school actually look for. Parents were making expensive decisions on the basis of whatever they had been told by whoever wanted the money.
The book is the answer I would give a friend, written down once so I do not have to give it forty times a year.
What is next
In January 2027 I open The Future Performer, weekly musical theatre classes in Bromley for six to sixteen year olds. It exists because there was no shortage of places telling children they were wonderful, and a real shortage of places helping them get better while enjoying it.
