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SCALE UP MASTERCLASS: SOMEBODY JONES

Masterclass One of Scale Up Initiative. We will be exploring networking and how to build your body of work at the Drayton Arms in person. One and a half hour workshop, chance to meet Somebody and other creatives from Scale Up. In association with ROAM theatre company.

Creatives: Somebody Jones (Playwright) & ROAM/SCALE UP founder (Nia Powell) & Audrey Thayer (Drayton Arms)

 

This event will run from 6:30pm-8pm

 

Somebody Jones is a Los Angeles native playwright/dramaturg, currently living, working, and dreaming in London. Jones’s work celebrates and champions Black culture in all of its charms and complexities. The playwright/dramaturg primarily works within the genres of horror, magical realism, verbatim, and recently, Black fantasy.

Jones’s debut play, HOW I LEARNED TO SWIM toured the UK in Summer 2024, going from Paines Plough’s Roundabout at the Edinburgh Fringe to Brixton House and then Bristol Old Vic. Jones is currently dramaturging Chadwick Boseman’s play, DEEP AZURE at The Globe, opening February 2026. 

The name Somebody Jones means the more you run from your past, the more you'll run into it.

 

Nia Powell trained as an actor at ALRA South, working with directors Emily Aboud (Evening Standard Future Theatre Award Winner, Bush Theatre, Theatre 503) & Paloma Oakenfold (Lyric Hammersmith, Channel 4). She has collaborated in association with Clean Break & The National Portrait Gallery. Nia also has an MA in playwriting & dramaturgy from Goldsmiths where she worked with practitioners from Hesitate and Demonstrate, Hijinx and Unicorn Theatre. Her debut play Parma Violets was performed at the VAULT festival and her most recent play Tears of Joy was performed at Soho Theatre, Landmark Theatres, Drayton Arms & the Lambeth Fringe. She is currently on the Elevate Mid-scale Playwrighting programme and has previously been on the Pentabus and Minack Emerging writer’s scheme.

 

Audrey Thayer is a freelance producer, dramaturg, playwright and Artistic Director of the Drayton Arms Theatre. She graduated in 2015 from Chapman University after earning degrees in both Theatre Studies and English Literature. Previously Audrey worked as a Resident Assistant Producer at Theatre503, after which she began freelance producing before taking over as Artistic Director of the Drayton Arms Theatre in November 2016. Since then she has programmed over 500 productions, with roughly 83% of those productions being brand new work. Over the past several years, productions at the Drayton Arms Theatre have achieved 9 Off West End Award nominations, 5 finalists for the London Pub Theatre awards as well as 1 win, plus countless additional nominations over the past several years. 

Works produced by Audrey's theatre company Lost Girl Productions include The Lesson (Theatre503), Midnight Tattoos (Drayton Arms Theatre). Works produced freelance or in association include A Sacred Place (rehearsed reading, Drayton Arms Theatre), Tenderfoot (Drayton Arms Theatre), The Laundry (Drayton Arms Theatre), You're Human Like the Rest of Us (Finborough) and Top Trumps (Theatre503).

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