A story about stories, with Taylor

We are taking a break from news of our new tour with this interview from Taylor, a guide who has been with the Insider team for many years now.  There is some real insight here into why Taylor is such a well loved guide. I will give you a hint, it has to do with passion. Enjoy!


I grew up in country NSW, actually closer to Melbourne than Sydney, and while I have been to Sydney many times, Melbourne is my much preferred city.

I feel that if a city has great weather and great beaches (as Sydney does) than it doesn't really need to push too hard for anything else. People will be happy enough with the beaches and weather. Melbourne (by Australian standards) has neither great weather nor great beaches and I think because of that has pushed for everything else. It has great theatre, live music and sport venues and is an amazing (almost European) cosmopolitan city.

But after living two years in Melbourne after high school I decided to move to Perth to pursue a degree in Theatre and Film, with the intention always being to move back to Melbourne after my three year degree was completed. As it turns out I spent ten years in Perth, with its smaller theatre scene it was a great place to get a lot of experience, but the opportunities for paid work were quite limited.

So it was at thirty years of age I decided it was time for another change and decided to move to London, but decided to do some travelling around Europe first before i got settled. My first night in Berlin I knew I wanted to live there and at the end of my travels, picked up my stuff from London and moved to the Hauptstadt instead.

a historic postcard of the Volksbühne

In a lot of ways I see the Berlin theatre scene to be a little similar (although much larger) to the Perth scene. There is so much going on and so many ways one can get experience, however with the plethora of incredibly talented artistic people drawn to the city, it can be quite difficult to find paid work. My favourite venue for theatre in Berlin is definitely the Volksbuehne at Rosa Luxemburg Platz. Its just an amazing venue steeped in 20th century history as it was completed shortly before the outbreak of WWI and like most of Berlin, heavily damaged in WWII.

When it comes to my own work however, i prefer venues that are much more intimate. In my play "Altbau" we used an apartment. With eight actors playing in four different rooms of the apartment to four small groups of audience simultaneously. Each scene is only thematically connected to the scenes in the other rooms, so they can be viewed in any order. Each scene is also specifically written for the room in which it is performed. The small performance spaces and limited audience numbers made it an incredibly confronting work, with audience members able to see, hear and even smell the actors performing less that a meter away in some cases. It was a very new style of work for me and has sparked my interest to create more site-specific theatre in the future.

Guiding for me will always be closely linked to my theatre background. I like to run a tour that is not just full of facts and dates, but full of stories. I see my tours as a one man show, I guess. I regularly get asked if I get bored of saying the same thing every day, and while that is not the case because tours will change and expand over time and I also do many different tours, the main reason I dont get bored is because every group, every audience is different in their reactions, their questions and reflections are why I still enjoy my job so much.

So there you have it, come join a tour with Taylor and know that it is not only one of kind but you the guest are indeed affecting the show!