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Guy Sprung (born on April 17, 1947, in Ottawa, Canada) is a film and theatre director. [1] He lives in the Mile End area of Montreal and was the artistic director of Infinitheatre for 22 years. He retired and was succeeded by Zach Fraser in March 2021.
Before founding the Half Moon Theatre in London, England, Sprung was an assistant director at the Schiller Theater in Berlin. As director of Balconville by David Fennario, Sprung traveled with the company on an international tour to England and Ireland. Guy Sprung co-founded Half Moon Theatre in 1972 with Maurice Colbourne and Michael Irving and was the first Artistic Director. [2] He directed the opening production of In the Jungle of the Cities . Other productions he directed included Will Wat, If Not, What Will?, Fall In and Follow Me, Get Off My Back, Ripper!, The 3p Off Opera and Paddy. He also directed the community productions Spare Us a Copper and Driving Us Up the Wall. [3]
Sprung was co-founder and first Artistic Director of the Toronto Free Theatre from 1982 to 1988. During this time, he conceived and founded the outdoor Shakespeare in High Park. He was an Associate Director at the Stratford Festival and interim Artistic Director of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, and he has taught at the National Theatre School of Canada and the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Montréal.
In 1990, Sprung was invited to direct A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow. The production ran in the repertoire for eleven years to sold-out houses. His experience in Russia inspired the work Hot Ice: Shakespeare in Moscow, A Director's Diary, "a combination of a travel journal, personal memoir, autobiography, manifesto, and director's notebook". [4]
In 2001, his Montreal theatre company, Infinithéâtre, was invited to represent Quebec and Canada at the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre in Egypt with its bilingual production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame/Fin de Partie . Sprung created the bilingual version, directed the production, and also played the part of Nagg when Marc Gélinas was in poor health condition to play the role he originated. Sprung is fluent in French and German and became proficient in Russian while directing in Moscow.
He also played Achenar in the 2004 adventure video game Myst IV: Revelation .
Sprung was a theatre critic for the Montreal Star in the 1970s and a literary columnist for the Montreal Gazette in the 1990s. His published works include Hot Ice, a diary of directing Shakespeare in Russian at the Pushkin Theatre, and the plays Death And Taxes and Fight On!.
He was briefly married to actress Kate Trotter in the 1980s. [5] He has three children.
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Sir William Tyrone Guthrie was an English theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at his family's ancestral home, Annaghmakerrig, near Newbliss in County Monaghan, Ireland. He is famous for his original approach to Shakespearean and modern drama.
Canadian Stage is a Canadian non-profit contemporary theatre company, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Declan Michael Martin Donnellan is an English film/stage director and author. He co-founded the Cheek by Jowl theatre company with Nick Ormerod in 1981. In addition to his Cheek by Jowl productions, Donnellan has made theatre, opera and ballet with a variety of companies across the world. In 1992, he received an honorary degree from the University of Warwick and in 2004 he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his work in France. In 2010, he was made an honorary fellow of Goldsmiths' College, University of London. Donnellan was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to theatre.
The National Theatre School of Canada is a private institution of professional theatre studies in Montreal, Quebec. Established in 1960, the NTS receives its principal funding from grants awarded by the Government of Canada and cultural ministries in each province, with added financial support from private and corporate donors. It has offered incomparable training to actors, directors, playwrights, set and costume designers and production specialists to work in professional theatre.
The Moscow Art Theatre (or MAT; Russian: Московский Художественный академический театр, Moskovskiy Hudojestvenny Akademicheskiy Teatr was a theatre company in Moscow. It was founded in 1898 by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time. The theatre, the first to regularly put on shows implementing Stanislavski's system, proved hugely influential in the acting world and in the development of modern American theatre and drama.
Kama Mironovich Ginkas is a Russian and Soviet theatre director.
Fyodor Fyodorovich Komissarzhevsky, or Theodore Komisarjevsky, was a Russian, later British, theatrical director and designer. He began his career in Moscow, but had his greatest influence in London. He was noted for groundbreaking productions of plays by Chekhov and Shakespeare.
Eimuntas Nekrošius was a Lithuanian theatre director.
Black Swan State Theatre Company is Western Australia's state theatre company. It runs an annual subscription season in Perth at the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia, tours its productions regionally and interstate, and screens live broadcasts around the state. Black Swan's Artistic Director is Clare Watson; past artistic directors include Kate Cherry, Andrew Ross and Tom Gutteridge.
Michael Howell Blakemore AO OBE was an Australian actor, writer and theatre director who also made a handful of films. A former Associate Director of the National Theatre, in 2000 he became the only individual to win Tony Awards for Best Director of a Play and Musical in the same year for Copenhagen and Kiss Me, Kate.
Cheek by Jowl is an international theatre company founded in the United Kingdom by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod in 1981. Donnellan and Ormerod are Cheek by Jowl's artistic directors and together direct and design all of Cheek by Jowl's productions. The company's recent productions include an Italian-language version of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, Russian-language productions of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, an English-language production of The Winter's Tale and a French-language production of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Cheek by Jowl is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and an Associate Company of the Barbican Centre, London.
Mark Lamos is an American theatre and opera director, producer and actor. Under his direction, Hartford Stage won the 1989 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and he has been nominated for two other Tonys. For more than 15 seasons, he has been artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse. In May 2023, he announced he will leave the post in January 2024.
The Half Moon Theatre Company was formed in 1972 in a rented synagogue in Alie Street, Whitechapel, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Half Moon Passage was the name of a nearby alley. The founders, Michael Irving and Maurice Colbourne, and the Artistic Director, Guy Sprung, wanted to create a cheap rehearsal space with living accommodation, inspired by the sixties alternative society.
John Paterson is a Canadian director, devisor, dramaturg, translator, actor and theatre creator who works across Canada, the United Kingdom, and internationally. His favourite credits include directing the installation of The List (BoucheWHACKED!), the site-specific The Women of Troy and F. Garcia Lorca’s The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belisa ; production dramaturgy on the English language premiere of H. Muller’s Macbeth: nach Shakespeare; and playing Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney in The Blue Light and Scheffler in The Ugly One.
Infinithéâtre is an anglophone theatre in Montreal. Located in the Mile End area of Montreal, most of their productions play at Le Bain St-Michel, a converted bath house. It was founded in 1988 by Marianne Ackerman and Clare Schapiro as "Théâtre 1774", and its name was changed to Infinithéâtre in 1997, when Artistic Director Guy Sprung took over. Known as an alternative English language theatre in Montreal, one-time referred to as the "risk theatre", they focus on developing and presenting new plays by Quebec writers. Under the belief that "Theatre is a collective experience that must be both an entertainment and a reflection of and on significant social and political issues". In this regard, they organize an annual playwriting contest entitled Write-On-Q. The prize is $5000 and an opportunity to have the play publicly read at Pipeline, Infinitheatre's reading series destined to allow the audience to contribute to the theatre's future programming.
Michael Irving is an English stage and screen actor born on October, 19 1943 in Ipswich, Suffolk.
Balconville is a bilingual play by Canadian playwright David Fennario. It is a two-act drama that is considered to be Fennario's best known play. Balconville was the first bilingual play in Canadian theatre history, and about a third of the play's dialogue is in French.
Alexandre Marine is a Russian-born actor-director-playwright currently based in Montreal. On April 23, 1993, he was recognized by the Russian government as a Distinguished Artist of the Russian Federation.
Kip Williams is an Australian theatre and opera director. Williams is the current Artistic Director of Sydney Theatre Company. His appointment at age 30 made him the youngest artistic director in the company's history.
Vasily Alexeevich Barkhatov is a Russian stage director.
