My List: Assistant director of Calendar Girls Abbe Robinson shares her list
Abbe Robinson has a long-standing association with Bingley Little Theatre and is currently the director for their latest production, Frozen. Abbe has been an assistant director on films including Calendar Girls, Asylum and Brideshead Revisited and was recently senior producer for Bradford City of Culture 2025 and was one of the creators of the re-staging of The Railway Children on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. She was the artistic director and producer of Light Night Leeds for nearly a decade, and she directed many short films for her own company, Mad Cat Productions. Abbe lives near Wakefield with her two children.
I’m currently reading: I love reading, but the problem is that there never seems to be enough time to do it. I could read before I went to school, and I loved all the Enid Blyton and the Roald Dahl books, but in my teens I discovered Agatha Christie, and I slowly read my way through every one of her novels. While I really enjoyed Hercule Poirot, it was those featuring Miss Marple that I liked the best, and my favourite book has to be 4.50 to Paddington. I collected all of her prodigious output, and I’ve recently moved home and found the box in which they were stored – there are some first editions among them, so perhaps they deserve to be reread. The book that I have ‘on the go’ at the moment is Really Good, Actually, by Monica Heisey, and it’s a very funny novel about a woman who tries to convince everyone that her marriage has failed after just 600 days. I really feel that I should go back to all the Bronte novels that I encountered when I was in my teens, because I really did not give them the attention they deserve. That thought occurred to me, of course, when I was in Howarth last year for The Railway Children – you really can’t escape those remarkable ladies when you are working only yards from their home.
I’ve been listening to: A lot of podcasts, and many of them are associated with my interest in psychotherapy – I’m at the very beginning of a process to enter the therapeutic world. Ester Perel does a very good therapy session, and there’s also Elizabeth Dale’s How To Fail, in which well-known people discuss their failures instead of their successes and how the former formed their later decisions. Failure, and the way that it changes outlooks and perceptions, can actually be very useful, with new perspectives. Another podcast is Uncanny, because I am endlessly fascinated by people’s stories – I don’t believe in the afterlife myself, and I am sceptical about explanations of happenings, but what people say about their experiences is always interesting. As for music, well, in the car and on long journeys, it may well be eighties music, and I’m particularly fond of Blondie and Debbie Harry. I saw them at the Piece Hall in Halifax, and it was brilliant.
On TV, I’ve been watching: Vigil season two – a great police procedural drama, made all the more interesting that it is set at sea, primarily on a submarine carrying ballistic weapons. It stars Suranne Jones and Patterson Joseph. The settings are pretty desolate; the performances are anything but. I’m also a secret fan of Celebrity Traitors.
The live performance I’d recommend is: Ballet has never been my ‘thing’, but then I went to see Gentleman Jack, from Northern Ballet, and I was simply blown away. It was at the Alhambra in Bradford, and it was so beautifully done and so evocative – and also beautiful to see two female leads together, instead of the man-woman love interest.
My next boxed set or streamed series will be (or was….): The new series of Celebrity Traitor, of course. It’s a very clever flipped ‘whodunit’ format. Back to my love of Agatha Christie, in an odd way.
The App I couldn’t be without is: Because of all the travelling, Google Maps. Then there’s the performance credits app IMDb, which tells me about performances, actors and locations and other vital information, and Amazon too, when I’m stuck for something that I need as quickly as possible – like that forgotten birthday present.
What is at the top of your “To do” Bucket list?: I’ve had the great fortune to work with some people like Helen Mirren, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson and Celia Imrie, so there’s no-one that I feel that I really want to meet – when you’ve worked with the best, why bother worrying about the rest? And I’ve seen some remarkable places, but I really would like to go on some road trips across America. Exploring out-of-the-way places and looking at different cultures. Closer to home, we’ve just acquired a camper van, and it’s great to be able to drive off somewhere for a short weekend break, probably with some wild swimming.
Frozen: Bingley Little Theatre, directed by Abbe Robinson. Monday 21 until Saturday, October31. The Theatre Upstairs, Bingley Little Theatre. www.bingleyartscentre.co.uk