Tim Supple

Tim Supple is an English theatre and opera director, with a reputation for breathing new life into familiar stories.

Tim Supple began working as an assistant director at the York Theatre Royal.

Between 1988 and 1991 he directed at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, Leicester Haymarket and Chichester Festival Theatre (where he directed Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench in Coriolanus.

In 1993, Tim Supple was appointed the Artistic Director of the Young Vic, London. Here he directed "Oedipus", "The Slab Boys Trilogy", "Grimm Tales", "The Jungle Book", "Twelfth Night", an adaptation of Lorca's "Blood Wedding" by Ted Hughes and "As I lay Dying" by William Faulkner.

He also works with the Royal National Theatre and with the company, he has co-adapted and directed Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", Dario Fo's "Accidental Death of an Anarchist", "The Epic of Gilgamest", "Billy Liar", "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Villains Opera".

Tim Supple works regularly with the Royal Shakespeare Company. With the RSC he has staged Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", Wedekind's "Spring Awakening" translated by Ted Hughes, "The Comedy of Errors", "Love in a Wood", "A Servant to Two Masters" and a co-adaptation of Ted Hughes' translation of "Tales from Ovid".

Supple has also produced a film version of "Twelfth Night" for Channel 4 on television and a short film, "Rockabye", also for Channel 4.

In 2000, Supple was invited to direct "Hansel and Gretel" for Opera North. In 2003, he directed their production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute". The Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden invited him to direct "Babette's Feast" by John Browne, which he directed in December 2004. In Spring 2007 he revived "The Magic Flute" for Opera North.

Internationally, Supple has directed at the Tel Aviv Opera House, the Maxim Gorky Theatre, Berlin and the National Theatre of Norway, Bergen.

In 2006 he staged a multi-lingual production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in India. Although Shakespeare's English remained in key passages, the actors delivered much of the text in their own languages — a mix of seven from India and Sri Lanka (Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Sanskrit, Sinhalese). Supple created "a sexy, kinetic production with a circus-like atmosphere" using an "obstacle-course set ... of bamboo scaffolding and ladders, swaths of red fabric and ropes that the agile cast ascend [ed] and descend [ed] with little regard to anything as prosaic as gravity." [Citation | last = Nestruck | first = J. Kelly | title = A sexy, kinetic dream in eight languages | newspaper = The Globe and Mail | pages = R1 | year = 2008 | date = June 9, 2008] . The experimental interpretation was considered by some to be the best "Midsummer Night's Dream" to play at the RSC (Swan Theatre, Stratford) [Billington, M: "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Guardian Unlimited", June 9, 2006] . The production played at the Roundhouse in London in 2007 and is now touring the world.

He is Co-Director of Dash Arts with Josephine Burton.

He attended Gosford Hill School, Kidlington and Lewes Priory Comprehensive School. [Woodforde, G: "Dream On", "The Oxford Times", October 12, 2007] . He subsequently attended Churchill College, Cambridge.

References

External links

* [http://www.intermusica.co.uk/artists/stage-director/tim-supple/biography Tim Supple biography] at his agents' website