JETHRO COMPTON
Jethro is a Cornish director, designer, independent theatre producer, and a writer for stage and screen. He began his theatre career in 2008 as the Producer and Co-Artistic Director of Belt Up Theatre, company in residence at York Theatre Royal. He worked on all Belt Up's productions between 2008 and 2012 including, The Tartuffe, The Trial, Outland, Macbeth and The Boy James.
In 2010 he established Jethro Compton Productions to develop his own work. To date, he has directed all the company’s productions, including The Bunker Trilogy and The Capone Trilogy, and his own writing, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Frontier Trilogy, Sirenia, Wolf's Blood, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
In Europe, Jethro worked in Vienna between 2016 and 2021, directing German language productions of his own writing. These include his adaptations at Theater Im Zentrum of Louis Sachar's Fuzzy Mud, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Victor Hugo's Hunhcback of Notre Dame, and H G Wells' War of the Worlds, and in the 700 seat Renaissance Theater of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper. In 2018 he directed his original play Blutrache for Theater Rabenhof, a co-production with Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen in South Tyrol, Italy, where it also played in 2019.
In 2010 he was awarded a bursary from Stage One to support his development as a commercial producer. He was an Associate Artist of Hall for Cornwall from 2016 to 2023. In 2023 he joined Southwark Playhouse, London, as Production Associate.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was published by Oberon Books in 2014. The Frontier Trilogy, including an additional two short stories, was published in 2015 by Samuel French Ltd. In 2018, White Fang was published by Samuel French Inc under the new title, Wolf's Blood.
Productions of Jethro's work have been licensed across the globe. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has been produced over seventy times across the USA and Canada. In South Korea, productions of Capone, The Bunker, The Frontier, and Sirenia have been presented in Korean since 2015.