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Irina Brook

Irina Brook

© Amanda Lane

Director

Artist-in-Residence, Teatro Stabile del Veneto
Artist-in-Residence, Château d'Hardelot



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‘Brook has brought back to the repertoire after thirty years a fresh and cheeky production of Donizetti's Don Pasquale and transformed it into a kind of opera-cartoon which will give you the time of your life’

Wilhelm Sinkovicz, Die Presse, Don Pasquale, Wiener Staatsoper

Irina Brook is an internationally acclaimed opera and theatre director known for her bold and innovative productions. Her work in opera has garnered attention at some of the world's most prestigious venues, with recent highlights including her return to the Wiener Staatsoper for Don Pasquale and to Teatro alla Scala for La Rondine. She is set to make her Japanese opera debut with Carmen at the Tokyo Nikikai Opera.

Brook’s opera career began with a successful debut directing Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte for the Nederlandse Reisopera. She has since directed a diverse range of operatic works including Yevgeny Onegin, La Cenerentola and La traviata. Her work at Teatro alla Scala includes Die Sieben Todsünden & Mahagonny-Songspiel and Il matrimonio segreto.

Born in Paris, Irina Brook grew up immersed in the arts, as the daughter of director Peter Brook and actress Natasha Parry. She moved to New York at 16 to study acting with Stella Adler, making her stage debut in Off-Broadway productions before transitioning to directing. Her breakthrough as a director came in London in 1996 with Beast on the Moon, followed by several successful productions including Mrs Klein and All’s Well that Ends Well.

In 2003, she founded Irina’s Dream Theatre in Paris, through which she has toured globally. From 2014 to 2021, she served as Director of Théâtre National de Nice, where she continued to push artistic boundaries and in 2021, she was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Teatro Stabile del Veneto. She was named Artist-in-Residence at Château d’Hardelot’s Elizabethan Globe Theatre in 2023.

‘It’s just a matter of seeing the movie in our heads and then it all falls into place, making absolute logical sense. That is my absolute obsession – I can’t bear a single phrase to not mean something’

Irina Brook

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