The King Stag

Andrei Serban was born in Romania and studied at the Theatre Institute in Bucharest. His earliest productions included several plays, culminating in an acclaimed staging of Julius Caesar, which led to The Ford Foundation grant to work with New York's La Mama Experimental Theatre Company. In New York he met Peter Brook, who invited him to work with him in Paris. Serban's productions in the US have included the classical Greek trilogy, The Trojan Women, Electra, and Medea, and The Good Woman of Szechuan, The Cherry Orchard, Les Paraplues de Cherbourg, and Agamemnon in New York, and several plays at Yale University and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard. He is currently director of the Drama Department at Columbia University in New York. Since his first opera production, Eugene Onegin for Carlo Gozzi, English version by Albert Bermel the Welsh National Opera, he has returned to Cardiff for I Puritani (a production also staged by the Company in 1993), Rodelinda, The Merry Widow, and Norma. He has also directed productions for Opera North in Leeds, the Netherlands Opera, Paris Opera, Geneva Opera, New York City Opera (Alcina), and in Boston (the world premiere of Philip Glass's The Juniper Tree). His production of Turandot had its premiere at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles before opening the 1984-85 season at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Recent stagings include Don Carlos, Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, and The Fiery Angel in Geneva, Enescu's Oedipe at the Romanian National Opera, Fidelio, Prince Igor and others. Next season he will direct L'ltaliana in Algeri at the Bastille.