Lewis den Hertog is a video designer, theatre-maker, and writer with a background in contemporary art, and one of the founding members of Groupwork, an award-winning Scottish theatre company focusing on physical and multi-media storytelling. Groupwork’s most recent production, When Prophecy Fails, conceived by Lewis and for which he was the primary writer, premiered at Manipulate festival in 2025 and is part of the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2026. The narrative outline for When Prophecy Fails was adapted from a 1956 psychological study of the same name which examined a group called The Seekers, the first American doomsday cult of the Space Age. Lewis’ adaptation of this book was used as the point of departure for multiple collaborative development periods with the core team of Groupwork creatives and performers, with the final work coming together in January 2025. Groupwork operates with an intentionally non-hierarchical collaborative structure, and Lewis’ role in the company spans across visuals, music composition, and sound design, as well as writing. As an artist he has a relentless fascination with stories which touch upon group psychology, supernatural belief, and the fragmentation of consensus reality. Through intuitive, multi-modal collaborations with other theatre-makers he gets the pleasure of bringing the drama and mystery of these stories to life.
Lewis will be in residence at Sweeney’s Bothy in November 2026. On Eigg, he will spend the week writing a new text which will serve as a point of departure for a future Groupwork production.