Stephen has been fortunate enough to work as an actor with many major UK theatre director/practitioners: Bill Gaskell, Danny Boyle, Stephen Daldry, David Thacker, Katie Mitchell, Corin Redgrave and Mike Bradwell included, as well as having a particular connection and fondness for working with theatre-makers from the former Yugoslavia, Ljubisa Ristic, Rade Serbedzija and Lenka Udovicki in particular.

Steve trained at RADA, later counting among his favourite teachers Barbara Goodwin and Ben Benison. Ben, in particular, was seminal; a brilliant mentor and inspiration.

Ben had been part, with Keith Johnstone and Roddy Maude-Roxby, of the improvisational theatre group Theatre Machine, so all the work he did was physical, comedic and open; though it was only later Stephen would come to appreciate this approach to performance, adding practitioners like Peta Lily, Mladen Materic and John Wright to the mix.

On the Stanislavsky side, Mladen was the inspirational teacher – although he also came from a very physical comedic tradition. Of course, in the former Yugoslavia, indeed in all of the those Central, South and East European theatre traditions, the ‘split’ between ‘physical’ and Stanislavsky didn’t exist.  Never existed. In fact the whole idea of ‘physical’ theatre was tautological. Because what would ‘non-physical’ theatre look like?