Hello listeners, and welcome back to A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare!

In this episode, I open up my discussion of Shakespeare in Oxford with Dr Peter Sutton, covering Jesus College’s impressive Shakespeare Project, and learn a thing or two about directing student productions!

Dr Peter Sutton is Alumni Engagement Manager of Jesus College, Oxford and Artistic Director of the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. He read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford before moving to the University of St Andrews where he completed a Master's in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Culture and a doctorate on political and social appropriations of Ben Jonson in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.

In 2021, Peter began directing the Jesus College Shakespeare Project - an ambitious collaboration between the college's Access and Development teams - to stage the Complete Works of Shakespeare for audiences of schoolchildren as well as the college alumni and wider university community. So far he has directed The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, the three parts of Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, King John, Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, and is currently starting rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Project is due to complete in 2034.

Outside of the Project, he has also directed productions of Gilbert and Sullivan and Ben Jonson, as well as the premiere of Brean Hammond's Ben and Jamie and a hybrid production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. As an actor, he has worked on plays by Shakespeare, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and Tennessee Williams, to name just a few, and has also appeared in a number of music theatre works including playing a principal baritone in all thirteen extant Gilbert and Sullivan operas, along with appearances in operas by Gluck, Janacek and Handel.

Enjoy!