Abingdon’s Director of Drama, Ben Phillips, shares his perspective on the forthcoming Senior production of Earthquakes in London – a play written by OA, Mike Bartlett in 2010.
“In a year of monumental transition for Abingdon – a season defined by the forward-looking momentum of becoming co-educational – I have found myself doing something uncharacteristic: looking back.
We know there’s nothing to be done, so we’re dancing and drinking as fast as we can. The enemy is on its way, but it doesn’t have guns and gas this time. It has wind, rain, storms and earthquakes.
Returning to this play fifteen years after it was written has been a strange mix of nostalgia and genuine alarm. While it feels almost funny to source “vintage” props like iPods and Blackberries, the core message hasn’t aged at all. In fact, Robert’s stark warning at the end of Act III carries a weight in 2026 that it simply didn’t have in 2010. Back then, it felt like a warning; today, it feels like a reckoning.
I’ve always believed that the best drama is fundamentally about people. What makes Earthquakes in London one of my favourite plays is the way Mike Bartlett takes massive, terrifying themes like climate change and makes them deeply personal. He has a gift for taking a global crisis and centring it on the lives of one family. It’s his focus on the human heart – with all its flaws and contradictions – that makes his work so gripping. Even after all this time, I humbly believe this play remains his greatest work.
My reasons for revisiting this particular text are manifold. As we prepare for a new era, we have embraced the opportunity to collaborate with our partner schools, and I could not be prouder of the pupils I have been directing from John Mason, Larkmead and Abingdon. They have been an absolute privilege to rehearse with. As ever, I am very lucky to have collaborated with an incredible production team who have worked tirelessly to bring this juggernaut of a play to life so imaginatively and seamlessly. I have also enjoyed working with movement director Selina Marsh enormously; her creative energy and imagination are an enormous part of the flavour of this production. However, this choice was also driven by a desire to offer the most fitting tribute possible to my former teacher and mentor, Jeremy Taylor, who has just retired after 28 years of service to Abingdon.
I have known Jeremy “man and boy”. To list his accolades or map his achievements would be an impossible task for a single sitting. For me, Jeremy’s essence – what made him a true “one-off” in the world of education – is distilled entirely within his original production of this play.
Directing Earthquakes in London during the 2025–26 year has been an exercise in profound reflection. It is a play that grapples with the collision of past, present, and future, examining how human agency shapes the destiny of our world. I first joined the Abingdon drama department in 2010, returning to work under Jeremy after a brief five-year hiatus of study. I arrived to find him in a state of creative electricity; he had just witnessed the premiere of OA Mike Bartlett’s epic at the National Theatre. Jeremy was struck by its urgent, “about-the-now” vitality. Characteristically, he decided that every pupil possible needed to experience it.
We immediately swarmed a train to London with 30 students. On the return journey, Jeremy’s mind was already racing. He didn’t just want them to see the play; he wanted them to inhabit it. He set about staging a school production of a show so contemporary that the performance rights didn’t yet exist. But in the theatrical world, it’s often “who you know” —and Jeremy, of course, had taught Mike Bartlett.
I was fortunate enough to assist Jeremy on that production; the first ever amateur performance of the play, and I have never encountered anything like it since. It wasn’t just that the play captured the zeitgeist; it was the electric, subversive energy that surged through the cast and crew. We felt we were doing something truly monumental.
That was the hallmark of Jeremy Taylor’s tenure. He was never excited by the “hum-drum” of the every day – the predictable rhythms of lessons, marking, and essays were not what kept him coming into work for 85 terms. He viewed the stage not as a classroom, but as a crucible for life-changing experiences. Jeremy wanted the young people he mentored to feel like artists, to subvert the “school play” stereotypes, and to be part of a collective creative explosion that would remain etched in their memories forever.
He instilled this fire in countless Abingdonians. Indeed, two members of that original cast went on to become BAFTA-winning actors and the writer of a smash-hit musical, respectively. They will undoubtedly tell you that Jeremy Taylor was a key architect of their journey (as would the man who wrote the play!).
Our production is dedicated to him – with immense gratitude for a career spent chasing the extraordinary.
The 2026 production of Earthquakes in London is taking place from Wednesday 4 to Friday 6 February.
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