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St Hugh’s Fellow interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today in Parliament

St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in English, Professor David Taylor, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today in Parliament on Friday 6 February 2026 about the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s career as an MP and celebrated political speaker.

Last year it was the 250th anniversary of Sheridan’s first play, “The Rivals”, and to mark the occasion the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, staged a production of the play that ran there from November 2025 to January 2026, and then toured to Bath and Cambridge. Sheridan is a celebrated playwright but what is less well known is that he was a member of parliament for more than 30 years and indeed was one of the most acclaimed political orators of his or any day.

Professor Taylor advised the Orange Tree Theatre on their production of “The Rivals”, and his first book, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford University Press, 2012), was all about the relationship between Sheridan’s theatrical and political careers. 

During the interview, Professor Taylor was asked if Sheridan’s background in theatre helped him in his job as an MP, to which he replied, ‘Definitely, on two counts I think: One because he had a remarkable facility with his words, he knew exactly how to use them, he knew exactly when to use them. So, he had that innate sense of, or the benefit of ambiguous words for instance, ways of getting himself out of difficulty, avoiding committing to a particular subject […] and he also absolutely knew how to be an orator, that is to really use his whole body to get his point across […] he absolutely did behave like an actor on the stage as many of the satirical cartoons of the period repeatedly showed him to be.’

The link to the programme is here (Professor Taylor appears from 21m 18s to the end).

A portrait of Sheridan can be found by clicking here.