Rob Hastie - Guest Lecture

Future Now, Festival of Creativity and Sheffield Hallam University is proud to present:

Rob Hastie, Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres - Guest Lecture

As he prepares to depart Sheffield, after eight highly successful years as Artistic Director, Rob Hastie will use his favourite production photographs to talk about the key moments of his time at Sheffield Theatres.

The last eight years have been a time of great success for Sheffield Theatres, in which they have collected many prestigious awards. They have been named Theatre of the Year by the Stage twice during this period, and during Rob’s leadership have collected a phenomenal 9 UK Theatre Awards, 7 Olivier Awards, 3 Tony Awards and 3 Stage Debut Awards.

Many of these awards are attached to shows that Rob directed, such as Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which won the Best New Musical award at the Olivier Awards 2023, played to great acclaim at the National Theatre and is currently on in the West End. Rob, along with the rest of the team behind this amazing show, was awarded an honorary degree by Sheffield Hallam University, in November.

There are so many theatrical highlights from the last eight years. No one who saw the incredible trilogy, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the opening of The Crucible and playing simultaneously in all three theatres, will forget the ambition and excellence of ROCK / PAPER / SCISSORS (2022), winning Rob and his other two co-directors joint Best Director at the UK Theatre Awards. Or some of the other productions that were staged at Sheffield Theatres during Rob’s tenure, such as Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2017), Life of Pi (2019) and Accidental Death of an Anarchist (2023) all of which started life before transferring to London and further afield. Pi subsequently crossed the Atlantic to Broadway, and Jamie became a feature film distributed by Amazon in 2021.

So, please join us when we give Rob the stage to reflect on the past eight years and also to give us all an opportunity to show him our appreciation of everything he has done for the City.

Venue: Dorothy Fleming Lecture Theatre, Charles Street, Sheffield Hallam University, 

Date & time: Monday 17th June, 6pm – 7pm

Contact futurenowfestival@shu.ac.uk