Pierre Audi (born 1957 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a French-Lebanese theatre director and artistic director. [1]
Audi is the son of the Lebanese banker Raymond Audi and Andrée Michel Fattal, the eldest of three children. [2] Audi's family were originally from Saida, but he attended the French Lycée in Beirut. While still at school, he initiated a cinema club and invited speakers including the film directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jacques Tati.
For family reasons, he moved to Paris in France and there attended the Collège Stanislas de Paris. [2] At the age of 17, Audi together with his family moved to England. He studied history at Exeter College, Oxford. In his last year at Oxford during November 1977, he directed an Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare at the Oxford Playhouse. [3]
In 1979, Audi founded the Almeida Theatre, an experimental theatre in Islington, North London He directed many productions at the Almeida Theatre in the 1980s.
From 1988 to 2018, Audi was the artistic director of the Dutch National Opera. Audi's productions with the Dutch National Opera include the first complete performance of the Ring Cycle in the Netherlands, the Lorenzo Da Ponte operas by Mozart, Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites , Peter Greenaway's and Louis Andriessen's Rosa - A Horse Drama and Writing to Vermeer , Alexander Knaifel's Alice in Wonderland , and Claude Vivier's Rêves d'un Marco Polo . Audi commissioned the opera Life with an Idiot by Alfred Schnittke.
From 2005 to 2014, Audi also was the artistic director of the Holland Festival. As of October 2015 he is the artistic director of Park Avenue Armory, while continuing his work as artistic director of the Dutch National Opera. [4] In September 2018 he left the Dutch National Opera after a thirty-year tenure, and became director of the Festival International d'Art Lyrique d'Aix-en-Provence. [5] [6]
The Dutch National Opera is a Dutch opera company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Its present home base is the Dutch National Opera & Ballet housed in the Stopera building, a modern building designed by Cees Dam and Wilhelm Holzbauer that opened in 1986.
Timon of Athens is a play written by William Shakespeare and likely also Thomas Middleton in about 1606. It was published in the First Folio in 1623. Timon lavishes his wealth on parasitic companions until he is poor and rejected by them. He then denounces all of mankind, and isolates himself in a cave in the wilderness.
Sir Peter Reginald Frederick Hall CBE was an English theatre, opera and film director. His obituary in The Times declared him "the most important figure in British theatre for half a century" and on his death, a Royal National Theatre statement declared that Hall's "influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled". In 2018, the Laurence Olivier Awards, recognising achievements in London theatre, changed the award for Best Director to the Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director.
The Almeida Theatre, opened in 1980, is a 325-seat producing house with an international reputation, which takes its name from the street on which it is located, off Upper Street, in the London Borough of Islington. The theatre produces a diverse range of drama. Successful plays are often transferred to West End theatres.
Michael John Attenborough is an English theatre director.
The Festival d'Aix-en-Provence is an annual international music festival which takes place each summer in Aix-en-Provence, principally in July. Devoted mainly to opera, it also includes concerts of orchestral, chamber, vocal and solo instrumental music.
Bijan Sheibani is a British theatre director.
Rupert Goold is an English director who works primarily in theatre. He is the artistic director of the Almeida Theatre, and was the artistic director of Headlong Theatre Company (2005–2013). Since 2010, Goold has been an associate director at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 for services to drama.
Ian McDiarmid is a Scottish-born British actor and director of stage and screen. Making his stage debut in Hamlet in 1972, McDiarmid joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974, and has since starred in a number of Shakespeare's plays. He has received an Olivier Award for Best Actor for Insignificance (1982) and a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for Faith Healer (2006).
Nicholas Verney Wright is a British dramatist.
Evgueniy Alexiev is a French operatic baritone. He has lived in Bordeaux since 1992.
Simon Godwin is artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. He was previously associate director of London's National Theatre, associate director of the Royal Court Theatre, and associate director at Bristol Old Vic.
Motley Theatre Design Course is a one-year independent theatre design course in London. It was founded at Sadler's Wells Opera in 1966.
Lucy Bailey is a British theatre director, known for productions such as Baby Doll at Britain's National Theatre and a notorious Titus Andronicus, described by a critic as "all eye-catchingly visceral but there’s little depth". Bailey founded the Gogmagogs theatre-music group (1995–2006) and was Artistic Director and joint founder of the Print Room theatre in West London (2010-2012). She has worked extensively with Bunny Christie and other leading stage designers, including her husband William Dudley.
Dieter Kaegi is a Swiss opera director.
Amir Hosseinpour is an opera director and choreographer who has worked in major opera houses worldwide. He collaborated with directors such as Pierre Audi, founder of the Almeida Theatre, Nigel Lowery, and choreographer Jonathan Lunn. His production of Haydn's Orlando Paladino, co-directed with Nigel Lowery, continues to be broadcast on Sky Arts HD regularly. Some of his biggest productions have been recorded for international DVD releases. His choreography for Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage at the Bavarian State Opera in February 1998 was described as 'stunning' by The Daily Telegraph critic, Rupert Christiansen, and it was also highly praised by Wolfgang Sandner in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Other outstanding reviews for Hosseinpour's work in the German-language Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) were for Les Paladins (Rameau) at Basel in December 2004, reviewed by Gerhard Koch, Petrushka at Munich reviewed by Jochen Schmidt in December 1999 and Orphée et Eurydice at the Bavarian State Opera in November 2003.
Thanks To My Eyes is the first opera by the Italian Swiss composer Oscar Bianchi. It was premiered at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in 2011 and received its Belgian premiere at the La Monnaie in Brussels in March 2012. The same year further performances took place in Europe. The libretto by Joël Pommerat is based on his former play Grace a mes Yeux.
Robert Icke is an English writer and theatre director. He has been referred to as the "great hope of British theatre."
Pierre Clayette was a French painter, etcher and lithographer, illustrator and scenographer. Active for five decades, much of his work was architectural in style.
"Golem" is a chamber opera created by John Casken, an English composer, in collaboration with Pierre Audi, a French-Lebanese theatre director. Casken wrote both the music and the libretto for the opera. It premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London on 18 June 1989. The opera was published by Schott and received subsequent performances and a recording.