About Us

Theatre Alibi have been making work for adult and family audiences from its base at Emmanuel Hall in Exeter since 1982.

Theatre Alibi are contemporary storytellers, creating  work for all ages that moves freely between the intimate and the epic and aspires to be inventive, joyful, moving, vivid, intricate and ambitious. Our productions are marked by a passion for the live event – actors as storytellers absolutely present with their audience, live music, a delight in revealing acts of transformation that would often be confined to the wings and a level of inventiveness that allows us to embrace action that might seem to be unstageable. The company integrates a wide variety of art forms into its work and recent productions have featured animation, film, puppetry, photography and music both live and recorded.

Theatre Alibi is one of Arts Council  England’s National Portfolio Organisations and is also grateful for support from Exeter City Council.

Board of Trustees:John Bunting(Chair), Pete Goodwin, Jonny Ison (Treasurer), 
Kira Lewis, Tony Lidington, Sophie Lovett, Jules Offord, Dulcie Oliver, 
Erin Walcon

How we make our work

Stories are at the heart of all our work. In the very best stories we get a vivid sense of ourselves and what might just be possible – we get some sort of handle on a mightily chaotic world.   And there’s something especially powerful about enjoying a cracking good story together, as a community – of theatre-goers, of school children, of neighbours….

I often say that our building, the very special Emmanuel Hall, holds a key to who we are and how we work. It’s a church hall. Ordinary enough you might think, built in the 1920s with a welcoming arched doorway, but behind that is a wonderful, white, high ceilinged hall where we create our work. If you come in, you might find a dancer dancing a story of pining for home or a puppeteer figuring out precisely how a young boy might climb into the moon or a projectionist perfecting the moment when a cartoon pig appears out of nowhere on a silk handkerchief. In the workshop beside the hall, a maker might be carving a swan from a great block of polystyrene or delicately painting the face of a little match girl or even working out the mechanics for a baboon’s bottom that needs to light-up. In a little room down the steps, a composer might be dreaming up music to describe a young girl plummeting into darkness or to accompany a group of old mates dancing around the kitchen as they make the tea. And it’s so important to us that our offices are in the same building, so that anyone can pop their head around the door of the big white hall at any time. We’re proud of working as a really tight team.

As well as having a pool of artists that we work with often, we enjoy welcoming people who are completely new to the company. So much knowledge and so many skills have been gathered over our years of making work together – there’s a whole rich language to draw upon. But equally we love hearing new voices. So, in most of our work you’ll see some familiar faces and others that you haven’t seen before.

Theatre Alibi is a limited company registered in England - registered company number 2265919. Registered Office: Emmanuel Hall, Exeter. Registered charity number: 299565.

Theatre Alibi is one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations and is also grateful for support from Exeter City Council.