Who We Are

Calantha Forde and Lloyd Collins met when they were both studying with Youth Theatre Ireland on the drama facilitation course Artstrain. Calantha and Lloyd were already at this point veterans of youth theatre, having been members themselves from a young age, to facilitating and running youth theatres created in their own local areas. In July 2017, Giant Wolf Theatre Company was born. We began with a devised piece, ‘Holmgang’, which we performed in the Sean O’Casey Theatre, and internationally at the InterTWINed Youth Theatre Festival.

2018 saw Giant Wolf focus on Playback theatre. We trained with Anna Galligan, and began performing as a playback troupe, with regular gigs in Dublin City. Our success there saw us perform at the Knockanstockan Music & Arts Festival, Culture Night, in Nixys, Bailieboro, Cavan and also The Moate Theatre. We continued this into 2019, where we performed playback at the Edinburgh Fringe.

2019 is when our partnership with the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, began. During 2019, we ran weekly workshops with a group of students, many of whom graduated from the Civic’s Tenderfoot programme. In our workshop programme we focused on ensemble work, group awareness, and movement theatre. We spent many workshops working on improvisation as well, and that is where the decision came from to create a show that focused on sexual education in Ireland. We worked with this group, devising the piece ‘Eggplant’, which we performed in the Civic, as well as at the InterTWINed Youth Theatre Festival in Cottbus, Germany

During the pandemic, we created a Discord server. We ran weekly workshops online and focused our work on radio plays and audio dramas, as well as podcasting. We held a successful performance of several original pieces written by our members in October. We continued to work on productions but due to the pandemic, were unable to perform them.

Since returning in 2022, we have performed two shows in the Civic.