Erasmus Mackenna
Maker
Erasmus Mackenna (they/them) is a director, lighting designer, scenographer, and musician. Their work dances on the border between fact and fiction, combining sociological analysis, nihilistic existentialism, and radical progressive idealism to create living portraits of damaged individuals leading secretly violent lives. Erasmus graduated in 2021 from the Directing Department at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. They are based in Glasgow, Scotland, and work and perform internationally.
Erasmus has been affiliated with our production house since 2021. In 2026, their final production with Frascati Producties will premiere: 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane. Earlier works at Frascati Producties include the self-written Sheath and Knife (2021), LENZ (2022), and — together with the company LENZ — Katie Cruel (2023), Hauntology (2024), and Anatomy of a Suicide (2025).
Biography
Born at the turn of the millennium and hailing from a post-industrial city in the northeast of Scotland, Erasmus Mackenna dedicates their work to the intersectional exploration of outsiders within society, giving voice and form to their lives and struggles.
Convinced that humanity in its current form is doomed to end in the near future, Erasmus is building a body of work that contributes to a modern mythology for our fractured world. Dancing on the border between fact and fiction, Erasmus combines sociological analysis, nihilistic existentialism, and radical progressive idealism to shape living portraits of damaged individuals leading secretly violent lives. Forgotten pasts, hidden presents, and lost futures form the environments of their existence — and their attempts to survive, resist, and sometimes succumb to these environments constitute the action and anecdotes within Erasmus work.
Erasmus considers themself an outsider in many respects — as a non-binary, transgender, and neurodivergent individual — operating in intersectional solidarity and empathy with others in similar positions, while seeking to engage and educate those for whom such experiences are not part of daily life. Their work depicts our species hurtling toward destruction, searching for enlightenment and restoration, caught in a collective psychosis dancing on the ruins of a decayed way of living.
Light, space, and sound play crucial roles in their work. They are deeply inspired by musical styles such as noise, drone, industrial, metal, and folk. Their work as a designer is strongly influenced by the aesthetics and spaces of subcultures, as well as styles such as brutalism, post-industrialism, cult, abandonment and ruin, digital culture, and rural aesthetics.
They graduated in 2021 from the Directing Department at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, where they now also work as a mentor. Their graduation productions included Crave by Sarah Kane and Maria Stuart by Friedrich Schiller.
As a director and designer, Mackenna has frequently collaborated with, among others, Mathieu Ball, Big Brave, Tos Nieuwenhuizen, Bo Tarenskeen, Jelle Huizinga, and Maatschappij Discordia, and has worked as an assistant director with Ivo van Hove, Eline Arbo, Espen Hjort, and Joe Douglas.
In the press
“Intergenerationeel trauma grijpt je bij de keel." Theaterkrant over Anatomy of a Suicide
"In het werk van de Engelse toneel- en scenarioschrijver Alice Birch (Succession, Normal People) is de zwaarbevochten positie van de vrouw een terugkerend thema. Met haar bekroonde stuk Anatomy of a Suicide introduceert het jonge theatercollectief Lenz haar nu in Nederland." de Volkskrant over Anatomy of a Suicide
"Het geheel oogt cinematisch en de aandacht voor detail is bewonderenswaardig." [...] "Een voorstelling die blijft spoken." Theaterkrant over HAUNTOLOGY
Productions
