Supple Productions

Tim Supple White Slant Image

Supple Productions creates transnational, multi-lingual theatre with artists and producing partners across the world. Centred on the work of director Tim Supple, over decades in the UK and amongst the world’s great theatre traditions, Supple Productions brings communal and essential stories to the stage arising from extensive international research and collaboration. Supple Productions seeks to understand the different ways in which theatre shows us ourselves and to keep theatre alive, open and free.

“The leading storyteller in British Theatre”

Financial Times

Former director of London’s Young Vic Theatre, Tim Supple has directed, adapted, researched and taught theatre across the world in a wide range of languages – including in Europe, India, North Africa and the near East, Iran, Turkey, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Russia and the post-Soviet States, and North and South America. In the UK he has worked regularly at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in London’s West End.

For Dash Arts, he created the celebrated multi-lingual Indian production of A Midsummer Nights Dream and the six-hour adaptation of The One Thousand and One Nights, with artists from the Arabic-speaking world (Edinburgh International Festival 2011). Recent creations include Freedom on the Tyne, an epic, city-wide collaboration performed on Newcastle-Gateshead’s iconic Tyne Bridge. In 2018 he directed The Tempest in Mandarin at Beijing’s National Centre for Performing Arts.

Awards and nominations include: Olivier, BAFTA, Evening Standard, Time Out, TMA, Herald Angel (Edinburgh International Festival), Dora (Toronto), Yapi Krede Afifi (Istanbul).

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At the Young Vic he directed A Servant To Two Masters (national & international tour & West End), As I Lay Dying, Twelfth Night, Blood Wedding, The Jungle Book, Grimm Tales (& international tour), More Grimm Tales (& Broadway), The Slab Boys Trilogy, Oedipus; for the National Theatre: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Billy Liar (national tour), Accidental Death of an Anarchist (national tour), Whale, Romeo and Juliet, The Villains Opera; for the RSC: Midnight’s Children (Barbican, national tour & Apollo Theatre, New York), Love in a Wood, Tales from Ovid (Young Vic), The Comedy of Errors (national/ international tour & Young Vic), Spring Awakening: for Donmar Wharehouse The Cosmonauts Last Message…; for Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company: Coriolanus (with Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Richard Briers and Iain Glenn) and John Session’s Traveling Tales.

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Other work in the theatre includes: What We Did To Weinstein (Dash Arts/Menier Chocolate Factory); As You Like It (Dash Arts/Curve Leicester); Beasts and Beauties, Too Clever By Half (Norwegian National Theatre, Bergen); Much Ado About Nothing (Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin); The Comedy of Errors (BBT, Istanbul) Oh What a Lovely War, Guys and Dolls (Haymarket Theatre, Leicester); Billy Budd (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield). As associate director at the Theatre Royal, York, Tim directed work by Kroetz, Arthur Miller, Willy Russell and Brecht.

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Adaptations for the theatre include: Accidental Death of an Anarchist (with Dario Fo & Alan Cumming); Billy Budd (with David Holman); The Epic of Gilgamesh; Grimm Tales and More Grimm Tales (with Carol Ann Duffy); The Jungle Book; Haroun and the Sea of Stories (with Salman Rushdie & David Tushingham); Midnight’s Children (with Salman Rushdie & Simon Reade); Tales from Ovid (with Ted Hughes & Simon Reade); Beasts and Beauties (with Carol Ann Duffy & Melly Still); One Thousand and One Nights (with Hanan Al Shaykh)

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Opera includes Hansel and Gretel, The Magic Flute (Opera North); Babette’s Feast (Linbury Studio, ROH); It ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (Grange Festival)

Film includes: Twelfth Night (Projector/Channel 4), Rockabye (IWC/Channel 4). Tim is the recipient of a NESTA Invention and Innovation Award for experiments in film.

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