ABSTRACT
I am one of the people who can say that, ‘the CPR changed my life’, and in my case, even more than most! When Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (later to become CPR) were looking for someone to work on a project about the voice, and I met Richard Gough for an informal interview, I was unaware this would both open up a whole new way of working for me – which is still a source of study, practice and inspiration twenty-five years later – and start a working relationship between him and me that would also develop into a life partnership through marriage and parenthood. And so my involvement with CPR is a truly family affair, CPR being always the other element in our family, the third party in this marriage (to quote a certain princess), and this plainly curtails my ability to reflect on CPR ways of working in anything other than a personal or partial way. A sense of ‘family’ has always been one that is strong in theatre groups and networks, as well as an expanded sense of ‘home’ where the demands of the work, and way of life, bring together the public, the personal, the professional and the private on many levels in a complex tapestry. An interweaving and balancing act bringing great enrichment and fulfilment as well as at times frustration and exhaustion, an interweaving where intense and complicated working schedules and the needs of children and childcare have somehow to be managed and integrated (and why consequently our daughter Lilith developed from a very early age a necessary role as both discerning theatre critic and diminutive cultural ambassador and social ice-breaker).
