Fiona Quilter-Wood

Hallmark December 2024. Fiona Quilter-Wood introduced by Mike Piercy (Mike and Candy Piercy).

Do you like a challenge? How creative are you?

One of the most creative of our village residents must be Fiona Quilter-Wood who lives in the village and is the owner of Fiona Michaels Flowers and Artistic Director of Equus Productions. Equus regularly stage shows in Lacey Green and other village halls in the area. They will be coming to us in the Spring with a staging of the play based on the well-known book – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

This is the story of an unusual boy who is way out on the autistic spectrum and has trouble relating to our societal norms. He gets involved in a mystery story centred around a murdered dog and the family relationships surrounding it. It will be a massive challenge to interpret the many voices in the book and bring this to the stage, but Fiona is relishing it

Equus is unusual as the company is not based in one location but does mini tours going into local village halls and theatres for one or two nights and then moving on – quite a challenge! They normally concentrate on putting on serious drama but every few years they do a pantomime which they stage at Christmas or Easter. Fiona usually directs the plays and sometimes takes an acting role as well, she also writes the scripts for the pantomimes.

Fiona is a long term Bucks resident, being brought up in Gt Missenden and attending the Performing Arts School at Tring Park.  She initially started work in the City in a marketing job which led her round the world organising events.

Finding herself divorced and with three young children, she changed careers to be with her children as much as possible and, drawing on the qualifications gained in dance and drama, she spent 20 years in a range of prep schools in London and then Bucks as Head of Drama. Once the children had grown up and left home, she had another career change to set up as an independent florist. She opened a high street shop in Wendover, and developed a parallel business doing flowers for large events (based on her early event-management experience). This went well, but following Covid she gave up the shop and now continues the business from home here in the village.

Throughout all of this, her dance and drama background still called, and she became involved with amateur musical theatre. She worked with various theatre groups and local theatres in London and then back in Bucks. However, she found that the traditional amateur dramatic societies were not for her and 10 years ago she and two partners started Equus Productions. This is a bare bones company with just the three directors in executive roles and they pull in actors and stage staff for each production as required – there is no regular troupe of members, although many chose to work with them regularly.

Fiona is also active in other ways in the village. She is the Advertising Manager for Hallmark and pulls in the money to keep us going. She also organises the Christmas Carols in the hall carpark and is involved in planning the events for the Village Hall 25th anniversary. In whatever spare time she has left she is a keen countrywoman walking her dogs or riding out across the fields.

We wish her the best of luck with her challenging project.