Adrian Sutton

Adrian Geoffrey Sutton (15 August 1967 – 10 October 2025) was a British composer, best known for his theatre music but also widely known for his symphonic and chamber music for the concert hall. He composed the scores for a series of well received National Theatre productions, including War Horse (2007) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2011). In September 2022, Sutton was diagnosed with an incurable cancer from which he died in 2025. Life and career Sutton was born on 15 August 1967 in Tenterden near Ashford, Kent. His family then moved to Zimbabwe and later to South Africa where he grew up. Before his success at the National Theatre, Sutton spent 15 years as a composer of “applied music”, especially music for television commercials. Sutton was introduced to his brother, the theatre director Tom Morris. That led to a commission from the National Theatre in 2005 to write the score for Helen Edmundson’s “play with music” Coram Boy, for which Sutton adapted and extended the music of Handel. The score for War Horse two years later is interspersed with simple folk songs on which Sutton collaborated with John Tams. The orchestral sections combine an English folk idi