ABOUT US

Jonathan Broadbent

Jonathan directed The Comedy of Errors at the Bishop’s Palace in 2022.

Jonathan became interested in acting at school, helped by his enthusiastic drama teacher Michael Day, who added Theatre Studies to the school’s A level syllabus and recommended Jonathan for the National Youth Theatre, where he was one of the youngest ever pupils at their summer school. Whilst still at school he toured Norway playing the name part in Macbeth and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. He then went on to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Since graduating, theatre roles include Peter Pan (National Theatre), The Dumb Waiter and The Turn of the Screw (Bristol Old Vic), She Stoops to Conquer (nation-wide tour), Love for Love, Queen Anne, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (RSC), Amadeus (Wilton’s Theatre in London) and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet (Rose, Bankside). 

In 2011 he joined Filter Theatre, becoming an artistic associate, appearing in their contemporary version of Twelfth Night, first as Orsino and then as a younger than usual Malvolio – and probably the only Malvolio in stage history to strip down to a tiny pair of gold briefs and turn cartwheels across the stage – and their equally revisionist production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Lyric, Hammersmith as a nerdy asthmatic Oberon. In 2016 he was awarded the Clarence Derwent prize as best supporting actor in the Donmar Warehouse’s revival of My Night with Reg. Though not a prolific screen actor – in film or television – he is in demand for voice-overs and has contributed to dozens of episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine.