About Sue MacLaine

Born and (un) bred in Brighton, I earned my performing chops as a child singing songs from the musical hall era in care homes around Sussex with an amateur performance group called ‘The Bunch of Fives’. I sang the solo ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’ and the duet 'Make 'Em Laugh'

Old-Time Music Hall, Vaudeville, Saturday-night-light entertainment, the art of Andrew Wyeth, silence and therapy have all been profound influences on my performance work and personae. The appeal is always to devolve the autobiographical ‘I’ in order to play, subvert and confirm truthfulness through form.

'what interests me is not the core but the potentialities of this core to multiply and expand infinitely: the diffusion of the core, its suppleness and elasticity' Anais Nin Diary 1 p.200

I received a scholarship from the Literature, Film & Theatre Studies department of the University of Essex to pursue a practice-as-research PhD and was awarded my doctorate in 2025, entitled:

"From a Dead Place: Presence of Suspension in the Handling of Post Traumatic Material in Performance Creation" The photograph above is from the practice performance "I Maybe Sometime" and the thesis abstract can be found in Resources.

The award and my being a Dr seems extraordinary having left school without qualification at 16. Following a period of homelessness, I found work in an independent fast-food takeaway shop which provided proxy family and sufficient wage to rent a bedsit and fund attendance at Lewes Technical College (now East Sussex College). I studied drama and sociology which led to a two-year period of study in Drama at Ivy House as part of Middlesex Polytechnic (formerly the New College of Speech & Drama and now Middlesex University.)

On leaving in 1982, I founded ‘No Boundaries Theatre Company’ to produce work for the "September in the Pink" Lesbian and Gay Arts and Music Festival at the Oval House London. I then joined ‘Scarlet Harlets Theatre Collective’ creating and performing in 4 productions: "Toe the Line, 80-Day Soul, Appetite of the Heart and La Folie" all of which were funded by Arts Council England, Greater London Arts Council, London Borough Grants Scheme. I left the company to join Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Renaissance Theatre Company’ between 1989 -1991 understudying and taking small parts in Look Back in Anger, Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and the film Frankenstein.

I then dabbled in stand-up, ended my marriage through no fault of my then husband, worked for the Zap Club/Zap Productions, Queenspark Books until eventually training as a British Sign Language-English interpreter at the Centre for Deaf Studies University of Bristol between 1995-1997. I have continued to work as a BSL/Eng interpreter in tandem with my creative practice. In 2009 I undertook an MA in Life History & Life Writing at the University of Sussex and in 2011 returned to performance and performance making.

In addition to the self-created works listed under Shows, I have mentored and directed predominantly dance artists (Antonia Grove and Janine Fletcher), created a curtain-raiser performance for Caryl Churchill’s play ‘Escaped Alone’ (2016) at The Royal Court, performed in ‘Any Table Any Room’ by Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, been a useful body in research & development for creators such as Tim Etchells, and provided bi-lingual translation (BSL/ENG) for the Globe Theatre productions of ‘As You Like It’ and ‘Hamlet’ (2019) and Antony & Cleopatra (2024).