Steven Dykes

Steven Dykes is a lecturer, actor, director and playwright. A graduate of the college’s Drama Department, he has been associated with Goldsmiths for over twenty five years. He has worked as a lecturer and director in both the Drama and Professional & Community Education Departments and is currently an Associate Lecturer, teaching and coordinating the London Theatre and Acting in London courses for visiting overseas students. He is also the Programme Director of the BA (Hons) American Theatre Arts programme at Rose Bruford College and a guest lecturer and coordinator for courses on the London programmes of St Mary’s University (Minnesota) and Centre College (Kentucky). Other work with American universities includes visiting lectureships at the University of Wisconsin and Concordia College, Minnesota; and on New York University’s London programme. His professional theatre work began - and continues - with NXT (New Cross Theatre), founded by staff and graduates of Goldsmiths Drama Department in 1985. As an actor with the company, Steven has toured throughout Europe and North America and played leading roles in the British premieres of works by David Mamet, Heiner Muller, Enzo Cormann and David Bown.

For the company he has directed the premieres of his own adaptation of Blake Morrison’s The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper; The Erotica Project (in association with Shady Dolls Theatre Company); and last year a unique simultaneous live and on-line performance event of his own play The Spoils (in association with Rave Media). His other plays include Homestead and Deadstock (Shady Dolls); a light gathering of dust (NXT, Edinburgh & Olney Theatre, Maryland); Kolonists (Bridge Lane, London & the Pelican Studio, New York); The Happiness Compartment (Soho Rep, New York and Greenwich Playhouse, London); and The Swing Left (Unlimited Theatre, Oxford and Leeds). He has provided English versions of the Estonian play Cold Come, Cranes Gone (Bridge Lane, London and Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh) and Leoncavallo’s La Bohéme for the ENO (Coliseum). Steven has worked extensively in the United States, as an Associate Artist with The Theatre Exchange, Minneapolis; as a collaborator with Julia Carey’s Theater M in New York; and in a long association with the Potomac Theatre Project, who produced his plays The Spoils and a light gathering of dust at New York’s Atlantic Theatre this summer.

Further credits as an actor include touring with Howard Barker’s The Wrestling School, leading roles at the Young Vic, Gate and Arcola theatres and regular work with the BBC and Granada Television. Over the past twenty years, Steven has collaborated with another Goldsmiths graduate, composer Paul Englishby, on a range of projects for stage and screen. Musical Theatre productions include amnesia and other means of escape (Young Vic Studio) and Visitation (Oval House). Dykes provided lyrics for Englishby’s BBC ‘Sound on Films’ Pictures On A Piano and The Score; the music-documentary Hidden Voices (BBC); and an oratorio, The Flood, recorded by the Tallis Chamber Choir. Englishby composed music for Dykes’ plays The Process, a light gathering of dust and the piano and song cycle for The Spoils.