Professor Rutter writes about Shakespeare and performance on stage and film. She says she knows her place in the theatre: she's the spectator.

A regular contributor to Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Quarterly, she's the author of Documents of the Rose Playhouse, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage, Henry VI in Performance (co-authored with Stuart Hampton Reeves), Shakespeare and Child's Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen and (connecting her interest in Greek theatre to contemporary performance) Tony Harrison: Permanently Bard.

Professor Rutter is a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 3 and 4 arts programmes, and lectures regularly at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. She is General Editor of Manchester University Press's Shakespeare in Performance series and sits on the editorial board of Shakespeare Bulletin.

In January 2007 she became Director of the Warwick University / Royal Shakespeare Company CAPITAL Centre, a partnership, supported by the Higher Education Funding Council of England, that promotes excellence in teaching and learning and the exchange of talent and knowledge between academics and theatre practitioners.