The book
Offstage is an intimate visual record of the Pip Simmons Theatre Group, created by photographer and performer Sheila Burnett while touring with the company from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.
More than 200 black-and-white photographs trace the company’s life: rehearsals, performances, dressing rooms, vans, ferry crossings, cheap digs and early-morning call times. Nothing is polished. Everything feels lived in.
The book reads like a road movie made of still images – a collective diary of a group of people who chose to make theatre in a different way.
Inside Offstage
The photographs in Offstage were never intended as a formal archive. Sheila carried a 35mm camera alongside props and costumes and shot what was in front of her.
In the book you will find:
• performers in full costume caught in unguarded moments
• long drives through grey landscapes on the way to the next venue
• load-ins, warm-ups and late-night debriefs
• the worn edges of theatres, hotels and cafés that framed the work
The sequence is simple and chronological. The images are allowed to breathe. There are short texts to anchor you, but the photographs tell the story.
The Pip Simmons Theatre Group
Formed in 1968, the Pip Simmons Theatre Group became known for work that was physical, political and darkly funny. Productions combined music, classic texts, original writing and a strong visual language. The company toured widely across the UK and Europe, often playing in venues far from the mainstream circuit.
The photographs show the group in these in-between spaces: outside power stations, in housing estates, on industrial fringes and in theatre back alleys. The work and the world sit side by side.
“We were always on the move. What mattered was the work – and the people. Sheila’s photographs remind me how much life there was in that.”
About Sheila Burnett
Sheila Burnett trained at Birmingham School of Art before gravitating towards London’s alternative theatre scene. In 1974 she joined the Pip Simmons Theatre Group, performing, touring and photographing with the company for more than a decade.
Her work as a photographer has since extended to theatre, opera, portraiture and book projects, but Offstage remains her most personal document – a record of the people she lived and worked with at close quarters.
Who is it for?
Offstage will appeal to theatre-makers, photographers and anyone curious about how a committed ensemble actually lived and travelled.
From the archive
