About The Author

John Hole

John Hole After Westminster School and Balliol College Oxford, John trained in theatre management on a Unilever Bursary resident at Bernard Miles’ Mermaid Theatre in the early Sixties. This took him also to work at the Oxford New Theatre and for the whole of the season at Laurence Olivier’s Chichester Festival Theatre in the year before the National Theatre Company commenced operations at the Old Vic. John then was House Manager at the Mermaid Theatre for a year and subsequently Theatre Manager at the then newly built Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford. He moved to Worcester in 1967 where as Theatre Director of the Swan Theatre he founded the Worcester Repertory Company securing the theatre its first Arts Council Grant. Working with such luminaries as Sam Walters and Mick Hughes, he also was instrumental in beginning a series of commissions for David Wood which soon established that writer/director as ‘the National Children’s Playwright’. This relationship continued when John returned to London in 1974 to open the new Queens Theatre in Hornchurch. His co-direction there with Paul Tomlinson of The Who’s rock opera Tommy transferred to the Queens Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in 1979. In 1982 John left to found his own commercial touring theatre company Vagabond Theatre Productions which undertook national tours, a David Wood pantomime and a run of Kevin Williams The Dustbin Man at the Arts Theatre in London’s West End. The late Eighties found him as Arts & Entertainments Manager for the LB of Hammersmith & Fulham after which in 1988 he founded his Street Performers’ agency CROWD PULLERS which he has run until the present day. During this time he also founded West Stage Productions with Kevin Williams which took over the lease of the Boulevard Theatre in Soho which the company ran for a year with their greatest success Bob Carlton’s rock Macbeth, From A Jack To A King, transferring with enormous success to the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End.

Throughout his career, John has also continued to write, with his two novels A Bedtime Story and The Ultimate Aphrodisiac being published by Hodder & Stoughton in the Nineties. His farce The Piggybank Spree (based on Labiche) was produced as part of the opening season of the new theatre at Hornchurch. His play, The Short Days of Life, about the life of William Morris with Joan Bakewell and Bill Stewart was seen at the Lyric Theatre studio in Hammersmith and the same venue hosted his play, The Irving Project, about the celebrated actor Sir Henry Irving. Flying Into the Sun, a play with music, written with Kevin Williams and Simon Webb was commissioned to open the new Charles Cryer Theatre in Carshalton in Surrey. He and Kevin Williams were also commissioned by the City of Birmingham to write Paradise Circus which played in an enormous circus arena on Cannon Hill Park to celebrate the Centenary of that City in 1989.

John has also found time during his career to establish various successful and some not so successful enterprises starting with a film and theatre criticism magazine Jury which was founded with others in the early Sixties. While at Guildford he established a reputable bookshop and coffee bar The Book Place in what was about to become a university town. His new publishing company CROWD PULLERS PUBLISHING opens for business in 2008 with the publication of his latest novel A Kiss For the Catcher (publication date: Wednesday 21st May).

John has three children, Ben, Abigail and Joe, from his first marriage to the writer Ginnie Hole and a daughter, Esther, with his marriage to Occupational Therapy student, Morag McRae, with whom he lives in South East London with two Border Collies, four cats and two guinea pigs. He is enthusiastic also about walking on mountains, chocolate Hobknob biscuits, skiing, a place in Wales called Cyfannedd Fach, Charlton Athletic, Strictly Come Dancing, Eddie Izzard, Venice, his wife, his four children and his two grandsons, Gabriel and Jack.