In 2005 Peter Dutton wrote a short retrospective of his life for a Spotlight feature in the programme for the Rep's production of 'Happy As A Sandbag'. We reprint it in full below. 

"By the age of five, I had already experienced the shifting fortunes of theatrical live. I had given, in my opinion, a stunningly impressive performance as a shepherd in the class Nativity play and contrived to fall in love with the girl who played the Virgin Mary. During a totally boring arithmetic lesson, I wrote her an illiterate but passionate note. Its progress across the classroom was intercepted by the teacher, who hauled me out to the front and slapped my legs.

My interest in drama developed at Wolstanton County Grammar School and with the Community Players in Newcastle and continued during national service and at university, where I started to produce plays and musicals. Teaching posts in Stafford and Hanley High School enabled me to produce school plays and I also directed four productions for Newcastle Amateur Dramatic Society during the sixties.

When I joined the staff of the Sixth Form College in 1970, I accepted a persuasively worded invitation from Ken Lowe and Peter Legge to act as a guest director for the Rep production of "The Flip Side" - a wife swapping comedy. The cast included John Walley. 

Thus began an addictive and compulsive relationship with Old Mother Rep, which has included some twenty-eight productions in addition to summer shows, writing materials for "Christmas at the Rep", doing front of house duties and serving coffee - under my wife's careful supervision.

If anyone had told me in 1970 that I should eventually serve a long stint as Chairman of the Players and be involved in the building of a new theatre, I would have doubted their sanity and/or grip on reality. In point of fact, the New Victoria Theatre was also built during the nineteen years I was a trustee so this must constitute some kind of record or call my own sanity into question.

I am very proud of what the Rep has accomplished over the years and I have thoroughly enjoyed the companionship, the laughter and the heated disagreements which have sometimes accompanied the creative process. Running a successful amateur theatre seems to provide a limitless number of problems and it is also a reminder that there is no room for complacency."