Emma Crowley Bennett laughs that getting into drama school was one of her greatest achievements.
That’s ‘depressing’, she chuckles, heavy with hindsight. When she opened the acceptance letter and cried in delight with her mum, Emma didn’t know her time at East 15 acting school, from 2014 to 2017, would subject her to daily abuse from her drama teacher, veiled by the concept of ‘high art’.
Newcastle-born Emma, 31, chose East15 for its experimental reputation. It was her first choice. ‘It has clowning, mime, all the wild stuff. I didn’t know what physical theatre was, but I knew that’s exactly what I wanted to do,’ she says.
When she stepped into the rehearsal room, Emma was primed to be challenged, undone, and put back together again, as was the expectation of drama school: to erode its students into perfectly malleable artistic instruments.
It was only in 2024 that Emma realised what she and her contemporaries went through was daily abuse at the hands of an exploitative professor.
‘We were naked every day,’ Emma says. ‘I would sometimes pretend I was on my period, other women would as well. We’d say, “Oh I’m just going to keep my knickers on today.”’
He made them beat each other with books, to the point where one boy bled. ‘To begin with it was silly, clowning, but then… He’d say, “Now do it naked”. We would do anything he said.’
‘I got beaten naked,’ Emma says. ‘There’s actually a photo of this guy’s back. It’s bleeding. And he knelt over a mirror, and the mirror smashed, he got glass all in himself. At no point did this director say, “Stop now”.’
Emma was asked to imitate oral sex until she gagged. ‘I had to start this show overdosing. Three of my classmates would come over and pretend to put a tube around my mouth and I’d convulse. They didn’t need to do that, because it was acting, I was holding the tube anyway. But before we did it, he said, “Oh, we need to see how far something can go down Emma’s throat before she gags,”’ she remembers.
‘Someone in my class had to put a banana down my throat, as far as it would go, till I gagged, and then mark it.’
Emma doesn’t remember fully, but thinks she was ‘probably naked’ at the time. They were naked most days, so she was likely naked and lying on a perspex box.
Another instance saw the male students imitate rape on the women in the group.
‘All the women had to lie on the floor, and the boys in the class would pick someone, and then he would go over and simulate having sex with them, but we weren’t allowed to move.’
This professor filmed the entire rehearsal process. ‘He filmed the whole thing. Everything we did every day. He filmed it all. He filmed everything and just kept it on his iPad. So all of this is somewhere.’
He would keep them coming back and doing whatever he said again and again by dangling their futures in front of them, telling them they would tour this show in China, all over the world. Of course, that never happened.