Meredith Oakes
Encyclopedia
Meredith Oakes is an Australia
n playwright who has lived in London
since 1970. She has written plays, adaptations, translations, opera texts and poems, and taught play-writing at Royal Holloway College and for the Arvon Foundation
.
She also wrote music criticism before leaving Australia for The Daily Telegraph
in Sydney, and from 1988 to 1991 for The Independent
, as well as contributing to a variety of magazines including The Listener.
where she took double honours in French and Music. She studied violin with Gordon Bennett of the Sydney String Quartet and piano as a second instrument. In London she initially worked for the magazine Music and Musicians as an editorial assistant and writer, and later was public relations officer for Allied Artists Agency from 1972 to 1973 when they were presenting the London Music Digest, a series of contemporary concerts at the Round House
.
She is married to the opera critic Tom Sutcliffe
. Their son, Walter Sutcliffe
, is a theatre and opera director.
in 1993. Other plays have included The Editing Process (1994), Faith (1997), and Scenes from the Back of Beyond (2006) at the Royal Court Theatre
, Mind the Gap (1995) at Hampstead Theatre, Man for Hire (2002) at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, and Shadowmouth (2006) at the Crucible Studio in Sheffield
. Her most recent plays were a trio of shorts, The Fisherman, Short Lease and SATB, written for actor-musician students at Rose Bruford College and staged at Battersea Arts Centre in June 2007. A volume of Collected Plays was published by Oberon Books in 2010, containing two radio plays Glide and The Mind of the Meeting, and five stage plays The Neighbour, The Editing Process, Faith, Her Mother and Bartok, and Shadowmouth.
Oakes wrote the libretto for The Tempest
based on Shakespeare's play with music written by the English composer Thomas Adès
. Her text, except for a few distant echoes of familiar Shakespearian phrases, is original. It is also lucid and apt for musical setting. The opera was given its premiere performance on 10 February 2004 at the Royal Opera House
, Covent Garden. It has subsequently been staged at the Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg, at Operaan in Copenhagen, in a new production by Jonathan Kent in summer 2006 in Santa Fe, and in two separate productions in Germany in January and March 2010 - at the Frankfurt Opera, staged by Keith Warner and at Theater Lübeck staged by Reto Nickler. A production of the opera by Robert Lepage at the New York Met is scheduled for 2013. Oakes wrote the text for the television opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1995) by the Irish composer Gerald Barry, commissioned by Channel 4. In summer 2002 this was staged in a production by director/designer Nigel Lowery for Almeida Opera, at the Aldeburgh Festival and in London, and also performed in the autumn at the Berlin Festwochen. Other opera texts she has written include Miss Treat for Des Oliver, staged by Tête à Tête in 2000, Jump into My Sack (based on a story by Italo Calvino) for Julian Grant
, staged by Mecklenburg Opera in 1996, and Solid Assets for Colin Huehns, staged by the English National Opera studio in 1993. Her cycle of poems, Edward John Eyre, was written to be set to music by the Australian composer Barry Conyngham
in 1970.
Both The Neighbour and Faith have been staged in the USA, the former in Los Angeles, and the latter off-Broadway in New York. Oakes’s plays are mostly published by Oberon Books. The text of The Tempest is published by Faber Music. Her radio plays have included Glide (1998, with incidental music by Gerald Barry), Trampoline (2000), The Mind of the Meeting (2002), and Alex Tripped on my Fairy (2009), all for BBC Radio 3
. She also translated the French Algerian playwright Fatima Gallaire's Pebbles for Your Thirst (Des Cailloux pour la Soif , Radio 4, 2002). For television she originated the story of Prime Suspect 4: Inner Circles (1995).
Oakes has also written adaptations of some classic works such as Thomas Middleton
's
The Revenger's Tragedy
presented at the Southwark Playhouse, London in 2006. Her new version of Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario) was staged by Garsington Opera in 1995.
Her translation of Werner Schwab
’s modern classic Die Präsidentinnen was staged in the West End in a production by Richard Jones
at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1999, with the title Holy Mothers. She translated Fatima Gallaire
's Princesses for the Royal Court Theatre. Other translations of classic and modern plays have included Thomas Bernhard
's Elizabeth II and Jakob Lenz's The New Menoza, both staged at the Gate Theatre in the early 1990s by David Fielding, and Strindberg
's Miss Julie staged at the Young Vic. She collaborated with Andrea Tierney on a translation of Bernhard's Heldenplatz which was staged at the Arcola Theatre in February 2010. Her translations from German also include Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (under the English title Luise Miller), Ödön von Horváth
's Italian Night, Thomas Bernhard
's Heldenplatz, and two contemporary plays, Moritz Rinke's The Man Who Never Yet Saw Woman’s Nakedness, and Christoph Nussbaumeder's To the South Seas by Gherkin-plane.
Her dramaturgical work included Stephen Daldry
's only opera staging to date (Manon Lescaut at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, 1991), and advising on his production of von Horváth's Judgment Day at the Old Red Lion, Islington in 1989 (qv: Wendy Lesser A Director Calls page 39)). Her collaboration with Daldry when he was directing her play The Editing Process in 1994 at the Royal Court is a major focus of Lesser's book. Oakes also worked as dramaturg on opera productions by Tim Coleman in Dublin and Belfast, and with Tim Hopkins on Forest Murmurs for Opera North
in Leeds.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n playwright who has lived in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
since 1970. She has written plays, adaptations, translations, opera texts and poems, and taught play-writing at Royal Holloway College and for the Arvon Foundation
Arvon Foundation
The Arvon Foundation is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom which promotes creative writing. It is based in the Free Word Centre for literature, literacy and free expression in London.-History:...
.
She also wrote music criticism before leaving Australia for The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph (Australia)
The Daily Telegraph is an Australian tabloid newspaper published in Sydney, New South Wales, by Nationwide News, part of News Corporation.The Tele, as it is also known, was founded in 1879. From 1936 to 1972, it was owned by Frank Packer's Australian Consolidated Press. That year it was sold to...
in Sydney, and from 1988 to 1991 for The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, as well as contributing to a variety of magazines including The Listener.
Life
Oakes is a seventh generation Australian who was educated at Cheltenham Girls High School, Sydney from 1959 to 1963, and then at the University of SydneyUniversity of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
where she took double honours in French and Music. She studied violin with Gordon Bennett of the Sydney String Quartet and piano as a second instrument. In London she initially worked for the magazine Music and Musicians as an editorial assistant and writer, and later was public relations officer for Allied Artists Agency from 1972 to 1973 when they were presenting the London Music Digest, a series of contemporary concerts at the Round House
Round House
The Round House is the oldest building still standing in Western Australia. It is located at Arthur Head in Fremantle, and recent heritage assessments and appraisals of the precinct of the Round House incorporate Arthur Head....
.
She is married to the opera critic Tom Sutcliffe
Tom Sutcliffe (opera critic)
Tom Sutcliffe is an English opera critic, author and journalist. He is also a current member of the General Synod of the Church of England, first elected for the Diocese of Southwark in 1990...
. Their son, Walter Sutcliffe
Walter Sutcliffe
Walter Sutcliffe is a British opera and theatre director.His work has been seen in the UK, US, Germany, Austria, The Czech Republic, and Estonia, including productions of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning, Strindberg's The Great Highway and the Austrian premier of Michael Tippett's The...
, is a theatre and opera director.
Career
Her first performed play was The Neighbour for the Royal National TheatreRoyal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...
in 1993. Other plays have included The Editing Process (1994), Faith (1997), and Scenes from the Back of Beyond (2006) at the Royal Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
, Mind the Gap (1995) at Hampstead Theatre, Man for Hire (2002) at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, and Shadowmouth (2006) at the Crucible Studio in Sheffield
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...
. Her most recent plays were a trio of shorts, The Fisherman, Short Lease and SATB, written for actor-musician students at Rose Bruford College and staged at Battersea Arts Centre in June 2007. A volume of Collected Plays was published by Oberon Books in 2010, containing two radio plays Glide and The Mind of the Meeting, and five stage plays The Neighbour, The Editing Process, Faith, Her Mother and Bartok, and Shadowmouth.
Oakes wrote the libretto for The Tempest
The Tempest (Adès)
The Tempest is an opera by English composer Thomas Adès with a libretto in English by Meredith Oakes based on the play, The Tempest by William Shakespeare.-Background and premiere performances:...
based on Shakespeare's play with music written by the English composer Thomas Adès
Thomas Adès
Thomas Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor.-Biography:Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London...
. Her text, except for a few distant echoes of familiar Shakespearian phrases, is original. It is also lucid and apt for musical setting. The opera was given its premiere performance on 10 February 2004 at the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
, Covent Garden. It has subsequently been staged at the Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg, at Operaan in Copenhagen, in a new production by Jonathan Kent in summer 2006 in Santa Fe, and in two separate productions in Germany in January and March 2010 - at the Frankfurt Opera, staged by Keith Warner and at Theater Lübeck staged by Reto Nickler. A production of the opera by Robert Lepage at the New York Met is scheduled for 2013. Oakes wrote the text for the television opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1995) by the Irish composer Gerald Barry, commissioned by Channel 4. In summer 2002 this was staged in a production by director/designer Nigel Lowery for Almeida Opera, at the Aldeburgh Festival and in London, and also performed in the autumn at the Berlin Festwochen. Other opera texts she has written include Miss Treat for Des Oliver, staged by Tête à Tête in 2000, Jump into My Sack (based on a story by Italo Calvino) for Julian Grant
Julian Grant
Julian Grant is a United Kingdom-born european classical music composer best known for a series of operas of diverse scale, and direct theatrical and musical appeal. He is also known for a series of chamber music works and his challenging children's music...
, staged by Mecklenburg Opera in 1996, and Solid Assets for Colin Huehns, staged by the English National Opera studio in 1993. Her cycle of poems, Edward John Eyre, was written to be set to music by the Australian composer Barry Conyngham
Barry Conyngham
Emeritus Professor Barry Conyngham AM is an Australian composer and academic. He has over seventy published works and over thirty recordings featuring his compositions, and his works have been premiered or performed in Australia, Japan, North and South America, the United Kingdom and Europe. His...
in 1970.
Both The Neighbour and Faith have been staged in the USA, the former in Los Angeles, and the latter off-Broadway in New York. Oakes’s plays are mostly published by Oberon Books. The text of The Tempest is published by Faber Music. Her radio plays have included Glide (1998, with incidental music by Gerald Barry), Trampoline (2000), The Mind of the Meeting (2002), and Alex Tripped on my Fairy (2009), all for BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
. She also translated the French Algerian playwright Fatima Gallaire's Pebbles for Your Thirst (Des Cailloux pour la Soif , Radio 4, 2002). For television she originated the story of Prime Suspect 4: Inner Circles (1995).
Oakes has also written adaptations of some classic works such as Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in...
's
The Revenger's Tragedy
The Revenger's Tragedy
The Revenger's Tragedy is an English language Jacobean revenge tragedy, in the past attributed to Cyril Tourneur but is sometimes considered to be the work of Thomas Middleton by "Middletonians"...
presented at the Southwark Playhouse, London in 2006. Her new version of Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario) was staged by Garsington Opera in 1995.
Her translation of Werner Schwab
Werner Schwab
Werner Schwab was an Austrian playwright and visual artist.From 1978 to 1982 he studied sculpture at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. During the 1980s he worked as a sculptor and woodcutter....
’s modern classic Die Präsidentinnen was staged in the West End in a production by Richard Jones
Richard Jones (director)
Richard Jones is a British theatre and opera director.- Early life :Jones was born in London, and studied at the University of Hull and London...
at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1999, with the title Holy Mothers. She translated Fatima Gallaire
Fatima Gallaire
Fatima Gallaire is a Franco-Algerian playwright and short stories author, who writes in French.She was born in 1944 in Algeria, and holds a degree in French literature from Algiers University, and one of cinema from Vincennes University....
's Princesses for the Royal Court Theatre. Other translations of classic and modern plays have included Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.- Life :Thomas Bernhard was...
's Elizabeth II and Jakob Lenz's The New Menoza, both staged at the Gate Theatre in the early 1990s by David Fielding, and Strindberg
Strindberg
Strindberg may refer to:People* August Strindberg , Swedish dramatist and painter* Nils Strindberg , Swedish photographer* Anita Strindberg , Swedish actor* Henrik Strindberg , Swedish composerOther...
's Miss Julie staged at the Young Vic. She collaborated with Andrea Tierney on a translation of Bernhard's Heldenplatz which was staged at the Arcola Theatre in February 2010. Her translations from German also include Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (under the English title Luise Miller), Ödön von Horváth
Ödön von Horváth
Edmund Josef von Horváth was a German-writing Austro-Hungarian-born playwright and novelist...
's Italian Night, Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.- Life :Thomas Bernhard was...
's Heldenplatz, and two contemporary plays, Moritz Rinke's The Man Who Never Yet Saw Woman’s Nakedness, and Christoph Nussbaumeder's To the South Seas by Gherkin-plane.
Her dramaturgical work included Stephen Daldry
Stephen Daldry
Stephen David Daldry, CBE is an English theatre and film director and producer, as well as a three-time Academy Award nominated and Tony Award winning director.-Early years:...
's only opera staging to date (Manon Lescaut at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, 1991), and advising on his production of von Horváth's Judgment Day at the Old Red Lion, Islington in 1989 (qv: Wendy Lesser A Director Calls page 39)). Her collaboration with Daldry when he was directing her play The Editing Process in 1994 at the Royal Court is a major focus of Lesser's book. Oakes also worked as dramaturg on opera productions by Tim Coleman in Dublin and Belfast, and with Tim Hopkins on Forest Murmurs for Opera North
Opera North
Opera North is an English opera company based in Leeds. The company's home theatre is the Leeds Grand Theatre, but it also presents regular seasons in several other cities, at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, the Lowry Centre, Salford Quays and the Theatre Royal, Newcastle...
in Leeds.
Sources
- Lesser, W (1997). "A Director Calls", Faber & Faber.