My Gurus: Jon Haynes and David Woods

Jon: Nola Rae, mime artist 

We were at a physical theatre symposium in Liverpool, struggling to articulate our artistic vision, when we stumbled across a mercurial elf-like being who managed to convince us she was the Mozart family. In my memory she did this while rattling off a few sonatas, conducting an orchestra and holding a mistress class in mime – for that is her field of expertise, one that we in Ridiculusmus had until that point in our lives mercilessly sent up. Nearly twenty years later she turned up at the Albany in Deptford to see us perform Give Me Your Love, and I’ll never forget the way she demonstrated to me afterwards how to project my lines from the wings. She is quite simply incomparable.