billy fisher

  Written by Victoria Grainger

Billy Fisher is a collaboration between writer Victoria Grainger, director Jaq Bessell and performer Jan Knightley, inspired by a crinkly sepia photograph of a woman called Mary Fisher with her young son Billy.

The play is based on the story of Mary's husband, soldier Billy Fisher Senior sent to war, proclaimed 'missing presumed dead'. He was in fact detained in a Prisoner of War camp in Alten Grabow, Germany with a Russian painter who painted a portrait from this photograph of Mary. Research has unearthed several of these 'painted portraits' still in the UK, though the identity of the Russian, remains unknown.

'Like A Fountain Troubled - The Tale of a Piece of Mind' written by Victoria Grainger  

Once Upon A Time there was an imaginary private-practice counselling agency called the 'Fountain Therapy Centre'. The transcendental, alternative therapist who owned the joint believed her mission was to aid her patients to spiritual health, and that they should be as clear as a crystal fountain, 'unmuddied'. 

One Day she took on a new client, and everything changed.

This is a story about the art of paying a stranger to listen, and the art of being that stranger.

 First Performed in 2008 at The Old Joint Stock Theatre, Birmingham