Alain Maratrat

Alain Maratrat is a French actor, theater and opera director born in Paris in 1950. His father worked as a train conductor and his mother, formerly a dressmaker, had left her profession to raise her children. Maratrat studied at the Institut National des Arts du Spectacle in Brussels, Belgium from 1969 to 1973. Three decades after graduating, he reunited with three classmates from that program to perform in Trente Ans à Peine, a play by Jean-Claude Carrière built around the group's shared experiences and aspirations as young actors at INSAS.

In 1974, Maratrat joined Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research, where he remained an active company member for nearly twenty years. During that period he performed in a wide range of Brook's productions, including Timon of Athens (1974), Ubu Roi (1976), The Conference of the Birds (1978), Measure for Measure (1979), and Carmen (1980), in which he played Lilas Pastia. His Broadway appearance came in 1983, when he performed in La Tragedie de Carmen. He also appeared in Brook's productions of The Mahabharata (1984), in which he played the role of Vyassa, Tadada (1986), and The Tempest (1987), where he played Stefano.

Maratrat's work with Brook extended well beyond performance. In 1984, Brook sent him to India to study Kalarippayatt and Kathakali, and subsequently to Taiwan and Hong Kong to learn Chinese martial arts and weaponry, including the trident, lances, swords, and iron balls, in preparation for the company's production of the Mahabharata. He also coached fellow company members in martial arts techniques for that production. His broader physical training has encompassed gymnastics, judo, contemporary dance, tai chi, kung fu, Eutonie, the Feldenkrais Method, and the Alexander Technique, as well as workshops with the Peking Opera in acrobatics and fire juggling, and study of Sumatran dance, Balinese mask, and Javanese puppetry. He has also studied singing with the Dagar Brothers in Calcutta and musical interpretation with Celibidache and other conductors.

Following his years with Brook's company, Maratrat built parallel careers as an actor in film and television, a theater director, and an opera director. His film work includes roles in productions directed by Claude Berri, Amos Gitai, Michel Deville, and Alain Berberian. On stage as an actor, he has appeared in productions directed by Bruno Bayen, Philippe Mantha, Gabriel Garran, Dominique Mühler, Bernard Sobel, and Gaston Jung, among others. His theater directing credits include Ferenc Molnár's Liliom (1991), Dumas' The Three Musketeers (1993), Gaston Salvatore's Staline (1994), Goldoni's The Impresario from Smyrna and The Dance Lesson (1996), The Conference of Birds with the Teatro Kismet in Bari, Italy (1998), Romeo was a Shoeshiner in the townships of Pretoria (1999), Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (2003), Chekhov's The Three Sisters (2004), Ibsen's Peer Gynt (2004), Marivaux's The Dispute (2005), Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in Berlin (2006), and Schiller's Marie Stuart in Lyon (2011).

Maratrat began directing opera in 1981 with Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges. Subsequent opera productions include Chabrier's L'Étoile (1982), Janáček's Les Voyages de Monsieur Broucek conducted by Gilbert Amy (1982), Offenbach's Les Brigands conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner (1987), Martinu's Les Trois Souhaits conducted by Kent Nagano (1990), and Salieri's Falstaff conducted by Jean-Claude Malgoire (1996). He served as both librettist and director of Passeport Musical Pour Paris with Mstislav Rostropovich (1991), and adapted the libretto for Kodály's Harry Janos (1998).

In 2004, Maratrat was approached by Jean-Pierre Brossmann of the Théâtre du Châtelet to direct Rossini's Il Viaggio a Reims, a co-production with conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg. Working with the Mariinsky's Academy of Young Singers and a creative team comprising set designer Pierre-Alain Bertola, costume designer Mireille Dessingy, and lighting designer Pascal Mérat, Maratrat developed the production, which premiered at the Mariinsky in 2005. The production received two Golden Mask awards, Russia's highest theater honor, for best opera and best director, as well as a Golden Sofit for best opera in Saint Petersburg. His collaboration with the Mariinsky continued with a new staging of The Love for Three Oranges in 2007 and a 360-degree production of Mozart's The Magic Flute in 2008, which has been performed more than 150 times at the theater.

Throughout his career, Maratrat has conducted master classes, workshops, and acting courses for actors, dancers, and singers across the world, sharing his sustained investigation into the body as an instrument of theatrical expression.