Terence Ian Shuttleworth (born 6 July 1963 in Belfast, UK) is a retired Northern Irish theatre critic and author. He was one of the senior theatre critics for the Financial Times May 2007- March 2019, and editor and publisher of Theatre Record magazine from 2004 until 2016. In March 2019 he left the UK for Germany.
Educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institutionwith a master's degree in English literature from Queens' College, Cambridge, [1] he wrote reviews for the Financial Times, and occasionally The Sunday Times , The Guardian , London Evening Standard , The Observer , The Independent , Daily Mail , The Sun , The Scotsman , The Stage , Stagebill, Plays & Players , Screen International , Broadcast , OK! , and City Life .
His 1994 book Ken & Em (Headline Books, 1994), is an unauthorised biography of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. He also made a contribution to the book Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel (Tauris Parke, 2001).
He was profiled in one of the four episodes of the 1998 documentary television series about critics, Critical Condition by Jon Ronson. [2]
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh is a British actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Reading, Berkshire, Branagh trained at RADA in London and served as its president from 2015 to 2024. His accolades include an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours, and was given Freedom of the City in his native Belfast in 2018. In 2020, he was ranked in 20th place on The Irish Times' list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter. In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Years Honours List. In 2000, Mendes was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, Germany. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 15 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet.
Martin John Christopher Freeman is an English actor. Among other accolades, he has won two Emmy Awards, a BAFTA Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and has been nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
The Russell Group is a self-selected association of twenty-four public research universities in the United Kingdom. The group is headquartered in Cambridge and was established in 1994 to represent its members' interests, principally to government and Parliament. It was incorporated in 2007. Its members are often perceived as being the UK's best universities, but this has been disputed.
John Russell Taylor is an English critic and author. He is the author of critical studies of British theatre; of critical biographies of such figures in film as Alfred Hitchcock, Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh, and Ingrid Bergman; of Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933–1950 (1983); and several books on art.
Ciarán Hinds is an Irish actor from Belfast. Hinds is known for a range of screen and stage roles. He has starred in feature films including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Persuasion (1995), Oscar and Lucinda (1997), Road to Perdition (2002), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Munich (2005), Amazing Grace (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Silence (2016), First Man (2018) and Belfast (2021). He was nominated for an Oscar and BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Belfast.
Seamus Francis Deane was an Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian. He was noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which won several literary awards and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.
Gerald Dawe was an Irish poet, academic and literary critic.
Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. He writes for The Guardian, and was the paper's chief drama critic from 1971 to 2019. Billington is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts. He is the authorised biographer of the playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008).
The Lyric Theatre, or simply The Lyric, is the principal, full-time producing theatre in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
William Benedict Herbert Nightingale is a British journalist, formerly a regular theatre critic for The Times newspaper. He was educated at Charterhouse and Magdalene College, Cambridge. His first published theatre review was for the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser in 1957, a production of Look Back in Anger by a local amateur group.
Conleth Seamus Eoin Croiston Hill is a Northern Irish actor. He has performed on stage in productions in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the US. He has won two Laurence Olivier Awards and received two Tony Award nominations. He is best known for his role as Varys in the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011–2019).
William Henry West Betty was a popular child actor of the early nineteenth century, known as "the Young Roscius."
Ananda Lal is an Indian academic and theatre critic. He is the son of Purushottama Lal, founder of Writers Workshop, one of India's oldest creative writing publishers, established in 1958. He is a former Professor of English and Coordinator, Rabindranath Tagore Studies Centre (UGC), at Jadavpur University, Calcutta and has now retired from active service. He currently heads Writers Workshop, translates from Bengali to English, is a theatre critic for The Times of India (Calcutta). While he was a professor at Jadavpur, he regularly directed plays for the Department of English with students in the cast and crew.
Sarah Marie Jones is a Belfast-based actress and playwright. Born into a working-class Protestant family, Jones was an actress for several years before turning her hand to writing. Her plays have been staged on Broadway as well as across Ireland.
Robert Anthony Welch was an Irish author and scholar.
Edna Longley, is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry.
Ripley Bogle is the debut novel of Northern Irish author Robert McLiam Wilson, published in 1989 in the UK although not until 1998 in the US. Written when he was 24, it is arguably his most acclaimed, winning the Rooney Prize and the Hughes Prize in 1989, and a Betty Trask Award and the Irish Book Awards the following year. Many elements of the novel are autobiographical; the author himself was born in Belfast, attended Cambridge University, dropped out and became homeless. It is regarded as a significant novel, producing "both a re-evaluation of Northern Irish literary identity, and an alternative perspective on the Troubles."
John Bew is Professor in History and Foreign Policy at King's College London and from 2013 to 2014 held the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center.