Welcome to Feelgood
Founded in 1994 by Caroline Clegg, this year marks our 30th anniversary. For three decades, we’ve been creating award-winning theatre that fuses the unusual with the imaginative, blending classical texts with ground-breaking new commissions at traditional and site-specific venues.
Our unique cross-art form collaborations feature a cappella singing and drumming,
Shakespeare fused with African dance, abseiling off cliff tops, pyrotechnics, and fire sculpting merged with music and drama. You’ll find Feelgood in parks, African townships, museums, traditional theatres, on national and international tours, and in the West End.
We launched spectacularly with the musical Our Girls in 1994, where a World War II bomber landed at Barton Aerodrome to disembark the cast. In 2002, Caroline travelled to Kenya and Zimbabwe, collaborating with Siyaya Arts Company and Over the Edge Theatre to develop Romeo & Juliet - Thando & Ruvhengo, a riveting multi-cultural production performed in Harare and Manchester. For this we were at the heart of the Commonwealth Games Culture Shock programme and featured in the award-winning documentary by Granada TV.
In 2009, we collaborated with Theatre Under Fire, a company exiled from Zimbabwe, to create an incredibly moving Macbeth in Heaton Park. Our commitment to innovative education and community programmes is highlighted by productions like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. Caroline Clegg and the company have been awarded the prestigious Horniman Award at the Manchester Evening News Awards and the Angel Award for Artistic Excellence. Caroline also received the John Thaw Fellowship at the University of Manchester and a High Sheriff Award in honour of her services to the community.
Feelgood’s range of shows knows no bounds: Blue Remembered Hills, Pictures at an Exhibition (Mussorgsky), La Boheme (Puccini), Wind in the Willows, Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz, Rosa, The Three Musketeers, Dracula - The Blood Count, Arthur - King of the Britons, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and West End transfers of Not About Heroes. We were honoured to be presented to HM The Queen and HRH Duke of Edinburgh at the opening of The Lowry theatre nearly twenty-five years ago, where we opened our production of Crystal Clear, followed by The Wizard Of Oz, which sold out for their first Christmas show.
In 2010, the world premiere of Slave - A Question of Freedom continued our trajectory of thrilling work from Africa, celebrating diversity and raising awareness of modern slavery. It won the Pete Postlethwaite Best New Play Award and the Inaugural Human Trafficking Foundation Media Award, presented at No 10 Downing Street. It was also performed in the House of Lords to aid the Nuba Mountains Solidarity campaign and campaign for the Modern Slavery Bill.
In 2014, on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, we followed in the footsteps of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon with an 18-venue national and European immersive tour of Not About Heroes. We began at Craiglockhart War Hospital and toured across the UK to places pertinent to them both, including La Maison Forestiers in Ors, France, where Wilfred Owen spent his last days. This was followed by a 5-week residency at the Trafalgar Studios in the West End. That same year, Feelgood was honoured with a second Lord Mayor’s Civic Reception for our dedication to the arts.
Alongside this tour, we launched an international poetry competition to raise awareness of PTSD, with workshops at Catterick Garrison, schools, and community venues across our 18 stops. The competition culminated in a special winners’ award ceremony in 2015 hosted by Jason Isaacs.
Heaton Park holds a special place in our hearts. We toured our summer open-air shows nationwide and performed our famous promenade productions there for 11 years starting in 1998. After a 9-year hiatus, we returned in May 2016 with Whispers of Heaton, presenting two new immersive site-specific plays, The Bugler and The Fight, to commemorate the Battle of the Somme and honour the Manchester Pals regiments. Since then, we’ve led annual Remembrance Peace Events and helped develop the Somme Memorial in the park. In 2017, we revived our open-air promenade productions with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, followed by Romeo and Juliet 2018 and Dracula 2019.
Our dream to build an open-air space in the park was halted by COVID-19, but we still hope to make it a reality one day to inspire and celebrate the joy of theatre.
For 2024, our focus is on raising awareness of modern slavery and the situation in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan with our play Slave – A Question of Freedom. Join us at one of our venues and help us to make a difference!
Feelgood is a Registered Charity (1092907) and Company Limited by Guarantee (3358285) with a board of trustees, who offer a strong leadership and management structure. We also have a ‘A Creative Think Tank’ - a dynamic group of professional artists who develop and discuss future projects.
Feelgood is proud to have the support of a number of well-known and highly respected industry professionals who regularly lend their support to our many events and productions.
Creating Work for Feelgood
Caroline Clegg is a freelance theatre and opera director, lecturer and Artistic Director of Feelgood.
"I draw my inspiration from a multitude of sources. It can be a chance conversation, a book, a film, a play, a piece of music, a memory, a painting or simply by being in an inspiring environment that leads me to ask questions - questions that challenge my artistic drive and passion to bring a story to life, to create a new show. I buy a clean note book and write a working title on the first page, and the journey begins, months, sometimes years before rehearsals begin.
My only self-imposed rule is to follow my instincts. The process is slightly easier if we are using an existing script but if we are creating a site-specific show I spend a great deal of time visiting the location alone and with the writer to listen to the ‘grain’ of the site.
With Heaton Park it’s like my second home.
I played there as a child and have spent over 15 years creating work there, and it still excites me. When I find a new location or am asked to create something somewhere new it is the beginning of a new adventure."