Biographies:

Jack Klaff
Jack’s first movie rôle was in Star Wars. His first television gig was an episode of The Sweeney, which also featured Morecambe and Wise. And his London stage debut, involving some fairly wild sex scenes, led—oddly enough—to long seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

When people ask Jack what makes him “tick”, he often talks about his father, who ran a watch-making business in Johannesburg. In the early 1960s Jack’s Dad repaired Nelson Mandela’s watch. It was on that watch that Mandela counted out the minutes, hours, days and years of his sentence.

On screen, most recently Klaff appeared as Flathead Jackson in The English with Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer, directed by Hugo Blick, and as Mr Leonard in Guy Ritchie’s gangster thriller Mobland. He has more than 200 other television credits including leading roles in Vanity Fair (BBC), Sherlock Holmes, Ruth Rendell’s Road Rage, Midsomer Murders, Freddie and Max, Miners' Strike and Bremner, Bird and Fortune, as well as adaptations of several of his own works. Alongside Mariella Frostrup he was also a regular advocate on BBC Four’s Battle of the Books, with James Naughtie in the chair.

Among Klaff’s films, apart from Star Wars, have been For Your Eyes Only, King David, Pasternak, 1871, Ten Pence, Threat, Dogma Hearing, Anxious and Astorga’s Magapolis Z. He was also the voice of Orson Welles in a documentary directed by Mark Cousins.

Klaff has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and other leading classical theatre companies, playing tragic heroes, villains and comic figures alike. His roles have included Orleans and Clarence in Henry VI, Orlando in As You Like It, Iago in Othello, Polonius and Claudius in two successive productions of Hamlet, Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth—five times.

Other theatrical roles have included Foppington, Trigorin, Kreon, Atahuallpa, Gulliver, Bohr in Copenhagen, Orson Welles in Around the World, and Michael Mansfield QC in Stockwell.

Jack has written and performed twenty one-man shows and written extensively for stage, radio and television. On radio he has played Quasimodo, Oscar Wilde, Elgar and others (winning two Sony Silver Certificates), and has read two BBC Radio 4 Books of the Week: Last Resort and Tokyo Vice.

As a writer and director his work has included Letters Alone, What’s Inside, The Shakespeare Revue (West End), Screaming Secrets, Maxim Shostakovitch (HBO/Granada), Acid Test and Reconstructed Heart. He has also written and performed for Bremner, Bird and Fortune.

For more than a decade Jack worked with Intelligence Squared as Head of Science and the Arts, and has taught or presented at institutions and festivals around the world including Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Imperial College and the Cheltenham Festivals. He gave a TEDx talk at the European Parliament and has held four visiting professorships at Princeton. He was Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Starlab in Brussels (1998–2002) and remains connected with its present incarnation in Barcelona.

His awards include two Fringe Firsts, the Jack Hargreaves Award for innovative television drama, a Lustrum Award for Special Moments, a Sea Bream Award for Science and Art writing, and the Herald Archangel Award for lifetime achievement.

Matthew Hahn

Matthew Hahn is an international theatre director, playwright and theatre for development facilitator, post-graduate with experience of creating, coordinating and implementing theatre projects in the United Kingdom, the United States, East & Southern Africa. ​  He is the Artistic Director of the Folkestone Performing Arts Company (fpac.info), a theatre company that celebrates local stories, shared creativity & innovation that is vibrant, relevant and rooted in the lives of the people who live across southeast Kent.  With over 20 years of experience as a theatre director and theatre for development practitioner in working with communities in struggle, he has co-created interactive and participatory international theatre projects focusing on developing and enabling young people, social cohesion, peace-making and conflict resolution in the Global South & North. He is a drama facilitator and trustee at Most Mira, a charity which uses applied arts to help to build bridges between divided communities in Bosnia.  His first play, The Robben Island Shakespeare, has been performed in the United Kingdom, United States and South Africa; he regularly facilitates 'Ethical Leadership’ Workshops based on his interviews with former South African political prisoners and selections from ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.’   Matthew has degrees in Political Science & Journalism from Indiana University in the United States and is a graduate of the Goldsmiths College Masters in Theatre Directing programme in the United Kingdom. He trained with the SITI Company in New York and with Anne Bogart in Dublin, Ireland. He has also trained with the Cardboard Citizens Theatre Company in London in their Forum Theatre / Joker Training Programme. ​ As an artist and social activist, he is drawn to complex political opportunities that allow him to utilize his skills as a theatre director, writer and facilitator to further developmental goals. For more information about work, please visit www.matthewhahn.org.uk.

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