Long before theatres existed, people gathered to share stories. Around fires. In halls. In homes. The tales they told — of heroes and monsters, deceivers and dreamers — did not merely entertain. They carried memory across generations. They told us who we were, and who we might become.
That impulse has never left us. It just keeps finding new spaces in which to live.
I have known Emma King-Farlow for over thirty years. Therefore, I can only write with unguarded sincerity. It is the only way to begin.
What the passing of time makes impossible to doubt is this: Emma has always been the same person in every room. A cancer ward at Christmas. A church crypt. A rehearsal room built around what the people inside it actually need. She does not choreograph her values. She embodies them. Quietly. Consistently. Without ever requiring an audience.
To live by your ethos discreetly is the rarest quality I know.
With her company Shadow Road Productions, Emma has spent years bringing theatre to the places it was never supposed to reach — Shakespeare in unconventional settings, Dickens in hospital wards, productions shaped around inclusion, and the fierce, unwavering certitude that a story, told well, is a collective act of love.
The Fireside Folktales Barnes Fringe Festival is not Emma’s latest project. It is simply the fullest expression yet of who she has always been.
Last May, Barnes became something extraordinary. Three venues, minutes from each other, gathered around Barnes Pond. Myths, legends, fairy tales, classic stories; not offered as nostalgia but as living things, still breathing, still changing with each telling. The festival was a conscious return to something essential — an audience and a story in its most natural form — nothing artificial, nothing manufactured, no digital spectacle, no curated moment. Instead, just stories. Just us.
At a moment when entertainment is increasingly driven by screens and distance, Emma turned her back on all of it and said: Come closer.
Earlier this year, I wrote Emma’s portrait for neun magazine — a piece long overdue, for a woman whose work I had watched and admired long before I ever found the words for it. In her characteristic generosity, she encouraged me from the very beginning. She trusted that I would find the essence of the artists she connected me with. She opened a door. Behind it stood Matteo Bernardini — an Italian filmmaker — and Fed Zanni — an actor, singer, and writer.
Matteo Bernardini is the creator of the short animated film, The Little Broomstick Rider. A world of paper, scissors, glue and watercolour brought to life — a child standing trial for witchcraft, persecution wrapped in the aesthetic of a paper theatre. His handmade art found its natural home in a handmade festival. Exactly where it belongs.
It was Emma who first believed in Fed. She cast him as Jesus in a production in Barnes, when his voice gave out mid-audition and he had nothing left to offer but exactly what he was. She did not hesitate. The Saturday evening of the festival, he returned. To Barnes. To her stage. To perform songs drawn from the great musicals — myths, legends, stories that endure. His interview, Dust in Light, is published today. Read it in our Interviews section. The circle is not metaphorical. It is literal. Complete.
I have not created this convergence. I have simply embraced it.
To witness art, made with conviction and care, offered with devotion, is not incidental. It is how we remember who we are. How we find each other across the noise of everything which would pull us apart. How the human story remains, in spite of everything — magnificent.
Emma King-Farlow has spent thirty years knowing this. That weekend, in Barnes, she built the realm that proves it.
The fire is lit.
🎭