Emma King-Farlow
Founder & Editorial Director
Emma King-Farlow is a theatre-maker, writer, director, producer and performer, and the Founder and Artistic Director of Shadow Road Productions, an independent theatre company based in Barnes, South West London.
Since founding Shadow Road in 2007, Emma has created and produced work ranging from original plays and adaptations of classic stories to Shakespeare, immersive theatre, festivals and literary events. Her work is rooted in a belief in the power of storytelling to preserve the truths and memories that matter, to create empathy, to bring people together — and to help us imagine, and perhaps create, a better future.
As a writer, director and performer, she is particularly interested in creating characters with psychological depth, authenticity and humanity: finding the truth of what makes people behave as they do and ensuring that, however extraordinary the story around them, the characters within it feel real. Her work frequently draws upon history, mythology, folklore and classic literature, reimagining familiar stories through a contemporary theatrical lens.
A passionate advocate for accessible and independent theatre, informed in part by her own experience of chronic illness, Emma believes access should extend both to the people making theatre and to those watching it. Through Shadow Road, she has created Arts Council England-funded productions touring to hospitals, cancer centres and care homes; founded the Fireside Folktales Barnes Fringe Festival as a platform for independent and under-resourced companies; and worked to create flexible, supportive environments in which artists with different needs and circumstances can participate fully.
Emma’s impulse to found Exits & Entrances came out of the same instinct that has shaped much of her work: if something valuable doesn’t exist, perhaps you should create it!
After nearly two decades making independent theatre, she wanted to create a place where knowledge, experience and opportunities that can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to access within the industry could be shared more openly.
She believes that independent theatre is not a lesser version of the ‘real thing’, nor simply a stepping stone towards it. It is a place where extraordinary artists make ambitious work with limited resources, where new ideas are born, and where remarkable stories reach audiences in unexpected places. With Exits & Entrances, she hopes to shine a little more light on the exceptional people who make that possible.
Personal Website ~ Shadow Road Productions ~ The Fireside Folktales Fringe ~ Emma’s Instagram
Maria Teresa Rivera-Schreiber
Editor-in-Chief
Maria Teresa Rivera-Schreiber has spent over twenty-five years as a cultural journalist and editor, working across the UK and Peru. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Exits & Entrances.
She came to journalism through a lifelong devotion to the arts: ballet and tap, the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, French film, European literature, the novel and the stage. These are not influences she has set aside. They are the inspirational forces which sharpened her eye and never left.
Her personal essays, published on her Substack, mariateresawrites, take a film, a novel, a piece of music as their door and become, somehow, entirely her own. She has written on du Maurier, Wilde, Wharton and Alain-Fournier. On Cinema Paradiso and its impossible tenderness. On solitude, on the unspoken, on the female experience, and on what refuses to be forgotten.
Her journalism follows the same instinct. She works in long-form: a conversation first, written questions that delve deeper. She is looking, always, for the unguarded moment. The instant when someone stops performing and lets you in. She believes that it is in that moment, and only in that brief interlude, that the truth of a person becomes visible.
If you are perceptive enough to catch it, you have found their light.