Max first started performing professionally with a theatre company called Cut String Theatre which he founded with a close friend at the age of 17, with money they earned from staging a production of Macbeth at their school. Cut String mainly developed productions adapted from Shakespeare and medieval mystery plays, and of the four shows they created he worked as a designer, producer, actor and co-director. He attended the University of Bristol on their Drama: Theatre, Film and TV studies course, where he graduated with a 2:1. Whilst in Bristol he performed in numerous student shows and showcases, as well as in several non-university affiliated fringe theatre productions. He and a close friend went on to work for several years as a performance art duo called Sheaf+barley (later max+noa), achieving a modest level of international acclaim in their field. Their work has appeared in several books, and they’ve performed in numerous festivals and shows across the UK – as well as in the Barbican Conservatory where they told peoples’ fortunes. They have been invited to international residencies from the Netherlands to Taiwan (where they exhibited work in two different cities and a national park) and were also invited to be part of the UK delegation to the 2018 CAPP conference in Madrid (an EU-funded cross-border collaborative arts programme). After going on an indefinite hiatus from the art world in 2019, Max returned to his original passion for acting. He was accepted onto the National Youth Theatre Epic Stages induction course where he was taught the viewpoints technique and had the privilege of devising and performing in a piece of theatre under the direction of award-winning director Ned Bennet. He also enrolled at the Identity School of Acting, where he studied for three years in the professional tier – gaining a thorough grounding in acting for film, devising, improvisation, various acting methods and movement techniques, and in particular advanced vocal technique and accent work from Giles Abbot and Phoebe Taiano. He is a co-founder and director of independent media production company Planet B Productions.
