Professional Theatre Company, The Fifth Wall, Launches Production of Hedda Gabler
This new theatre company is launching in Lincoln this July with a professional production of Hedda Gabler on the 10th anniversary of Patrick Marber’s adaptation of the classic play. Produced and directed by Royal Central School of Speech and Drama graduate Tim Connolly, the production will run at The Blue Room, The Lawn, Lincoln, from July 2nd-4th.
The company was founded on the belief that Lincoln and the surrounding areas are underserved in terms of the amount of professional drama produced. There are some excellent shows, just not many of them. Lincoln has a thriving performing arts scene, but as in many UK cities, pantomimes, tribute acts, comedy and musicals have increasingly come to dominate. Valuable and entertaining though they are, traditional drama has become far less represented. While some excellent theatre is still produced, it has become increasingly rare.
Connolly said: “We value Lincoln’s vibrant live arts scene, but there is a real scarcity of dramatic theatre which, excellent though it is, accounted for far less than 0.5% of live performances in 2025. The appetite from the community is clearly there, but audiences have gradually fallen out of the habit of attending drama as so little is consistently produced and promoted locally, partly due to the perception that it is less commercially viable. As one of the foundational forms from which so much live performance has evolved, we believe drama still has a vital place in the cultural life of the city. Our aim is to help make professional drama commercially sustainable for local actors, creatives and audiences alike, while strengthening Lincoln’s reputation as a home for ambitious theatre.”
Fifth Wall’s plan is to build on the foundations of the National Theatre’s Theatre Nation Partnerships work from 2017 to 2025, with an initial focus on the East Midlands and a particular commitment to high quality drama. He added: “Longer term, the mission is bigger than Lincoln — we want to help improve communities by helping restore access to more professional drama across the regions, which audiences deserve, not just through our own productions but to encourage others too. By starting with Hedda Gabler, a tense psychological thriller, we wanted to begin with impact — a real jolt to the system. We want audiences to leave not only entertained, but gripped, emotionally engaged and still talking about the production afterwards.”
The intimate setting of The Blue Room, on the site of a former psychiatric hospital, places audiences close to the action, heightening the immediacy and psychological intensity of one of theatre’s most penetrating studies of control, repression and mental unravelling. Staged in a space where patients once performed, the production gains an added and unsettling resonance.
Connolly brings over 30 years of experience across theatre and film, with directing credits in London, at the Edinburgh Fringe and across the UK regions, including works by Beckett, Ibsen, Büchner and Sartre.
