Artistic Director - Nobby Dimon

Took a degree in English & Theatre Studies at Lancaster University and a post-grad teaching course at Bretton Hall.

Founded North Country Theatre in 1995 and formally set up the company in 1996. His very popular accessible and visually inventive style & quirky humour quickly established the company in the North and Midlands as a purveyor of high quality entertainment. Much of the work he has created involves leading a team of actors through a devising process and simultaneously writing a script, sometimes in verse. As well as creating hilarious ripping yarns based on classic adventures such as "The 39 Steps", "2001" and "The Lost World" and staging medieval mystery plays he has also created the first stage adaptation of JL Carr's "A Month in the Country". Several of his scripts have been performed by other theatre companies in theatres from Pitlochry to Hornchurch.

Previously he had eight very successful years as Theatre in Education Director at the Harrogate Theatre. Work there included innovative week long residences in village primary schools, exciting participatory dramas on themes as varied as the technology of flight, war poetry and art, emigration from the dales, food adulteration, the Trojan Horse. In other words not a load of preaching on contemporary social issues. Nobby continues to produce educational and site specific dramas in castles stately homes unusual landscapes and the actor/teacher in role methods he has become something of an expert in, continue to excite and delight primary school children.

Earlier still he was an associate director of Durham Theatre Company where amongst many other projects he directed the award winning "Not By Bread Alone" by Margaret Pine, a play created by and for the women of the Easington Miners support Group during the 1984-85 Miners Strike.

For Cleveland Theatre Company he directed two large scale Community Plays in Hartlepool created with writer John Bond which involved hundreds of people as participants and thousands as audience,an experience he has repeated in Richmond creating "The Last Dance of a Dalesman"  and most recently  "Blame it on Bartle" , large scale community plays for Richmondshire, the latter involving a contingent of performers from our our twin community in Norway.

He has also been a guest director for Snap Theatre Company for Dorset Theatre Company, Charivari and Jack Drum.

Being a dales based actor he once had a line in the BBC's All Creatures Great Small.

"There is nothing I like better than working in the small theatres and village halls in rural areas where there is no pretension and arty-ness; where the crowd, (and it usually is a crowd) is right up against the action, where actors share an interval cup of tea with the audience and yet still transport them five minutes later. There is a real sense of a shared experience."

Nobby Dimon