Carole Pluckrose - Co-founder of Arc

Carole trained as an actor at Exeter University and got her first job with Triple Action Theatre, touring internationally playing such roles as Molly Bloom in Ulysses and Mephistopheles in Faustus. She also spent six months with TAT in Poland, working with Grotowski's company at the Teatr Laboratorium in Wroclaw. Carole's early training had a bias towards physical theatre, with her greatest influencers, in addition to Grotowski, being Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, Joan Littlewood and choreographer Pina Bausch.

Carole went on to work at the Theatre Royal Stratford with Actor's Shop, developing her improvisation skills and naturalistic performance, before co-founding Arc with writer Clifford Oliver in 1984. Arc's first new theatre piece was her solo performance, Fallen by Polly Teale, directed by Julia Bardsley, which won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986 and went onto a London run and national tour. Carole's second solo show was Candles in My Eyes by Mike English – the story of Pauline Cutting's work as a doctor in war-torn Beirut.

Carole moved into directing in 1993 and directed most of Arc's plays for the next twenty years. She has a passion for actor training and has developed her own method of working, which is actor-centred and focused on using the fluency of theatre process to uncover the layers of a text.

Carole left Arc in summer 2013 to persue new ventures in theatre.