Jan Palmer-Sayer was our GoDA adjudicator for the 2026 festival …

Jan studied at Trent Park College and at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance.   Her theatrical exploits have taken her as far afield as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where her production of The Fall of the House of Usher was  a sell-out show and awarded 5 stars by The Scotsman.  

In 2014, Jan was commissioned by the Arts Council, Isle of Man to direct a community passion play at Easter while at the other end of the country, her production of The Grapes of Wrath, adapted by Frank Galati, was one of a sequence of regular appearances by her theatre company at the famous cliffside Minack Theatre and it gained the company another 5-star review as well as the coveted Minack Trophy for the best production of 2015.

This was followed in 2019 with a 5* production of I, Don Quixote, by Dale Wasserman, named runner-up for the Minack Trophy and playing (when it wasn’t rained off!) to full houses, and she was once again invited to play there in 2021 with a madcap production of The 39 Steps – a suitable antidote against the country’s lockdown.

The company returned to the Minack in 2023 with Jan’s production of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin: “what a beautiful production; visually rich, musically enchanting and deeply moving. . .” and were back again in 2025 to present Shakespeare in Love, in which she also cast herself as QE1. The show played to sell-out houses and was, once again, a runner up for the Minack Trophy.   

Jan’s other recent directing credits include Pressure by David Haig (which won the British All Winners Festival in July 2021), Husbands and Sons adapted by Ben Power, Peep by Jodi Gray, Peter Whelan’s The Bright and Bold Design, The Winslow Boy and she is currently in rehearsal for Hobson’s Choice.

She also finds time to act, appearing recently in The Cane by Mark Ravenhill, The Children by Lucy Kirkwood, A Monster Calls, based on the novel by Patrick Ness as well as playing four roles in a recently staged collection of new writing.

Jan was appointed as a GoDA adjudicator in 2001. She returned to GoDA’s Council in 2014 to organise the 2015 National Festivals Conference, held in London.  She is a past Chairman of the Guild of Drama Adjudicators, and over the last few years she has adjudicated festivals in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Gibraltar and the USA.

Jan last adjudicated the National Drama Festival in 2022, and we were delighted to welcome her back.