Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Paul is an educator, actor and director who has worked in professional theatre and actor training for 40 years. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

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He was the first member of his family to go to University, attending the University of Ottawa, Canada as an international student from 1981-1982, leaving before graduation when offered an acting job with the National Arts Centre Theatre Company in Ottawa, appearing in Journey’s End by R.C.Sherriff, Narrow Road to the Deep North by Edward Bond, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth by Tom Stoppard, and Shakespeare’s Richard III.

 

Returning to England Paul trained as an actor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama from 1983-85 and his first job on graduation was playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where he also appeared in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

 

At the National Theatre in London Paul appeared in Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search Of An Author, and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Henry IV parts I & II, Twelfth Night, Sophocles’ Theban Trilogy and A Patriot For Me by John Osborne.

 

Other notable acting projects include Much Ado About Nothing with Cheek by Jowl, As You Like It at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre, and A Doll’s House at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

 

2007 brought a change of direction, and Paul returned to Central (University of London) to take a masters degree in Voice Studies, graduating in 2008 and returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the Text, Voice and Artist Development Department.

 

From 2009 – 2017 Paul was Course Director of MA European Classical Acting at Drama Centre London (Central Saint Martin’s/University of the Arts) where he was the lead acting teacher, responsible for the vision and coherence of the course, as well as the overall academic management. He also spent 4 years as the Academic Co-ordinator for all nine courses within the performance programme at CSM.

 

MA Acting (as the course became), was a 45 week intensive postgraduate conservatoire actor training course which focussed on the challenges presented by the work of Shakespeare and Chekhov, with the students spending 8 weeks at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow, studying the work and methodology of Stanislavski and its development through the work of Evgeny Vakhtangov.

 

After Drama Centre, as well as continuing to teach and direct professional and student projects in the U.K., and internationally in Russia, India, Italy, Bulgaria and Latvia; Paul formed The Shakespeare Edit – a company committed to bringing vivid productions of Shakespeare to the international stage. Shakespeare that is pared down but not dumbed down, distilled but not diluted, with a focus on language, imaginative storytelling, and psychologically believable characters.​