Silviu Purcărete was born in Bucharest in 1950 and earned his degree in directing from that city's National University of Theatrical Arts and Cinematography in 1974. In 1978, he became both a director at Bucharest's Teatrul Mic (Little Theatre) and a university instructor back at his alma mater. In 1986, he won the grand prize at the national theatre festival for his production of Goldoni's Il Campiello. A regularly collaborator with the Marin Sorescu National Theatre of Craiova by 1988, he burst onto the international theatre scene in 1990 with Ubu Roi with Scenes from Macbeth (combining the works by Alfred Jarry and William Shakespeare), which was followed by Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare, 1992), Phaedra (Euripides/Seneca, 1993), the Oresteia (Aeschylus, 1998), and three more Shakespearean works: Measure for Measure (2008), As You Like It (2004) and The Tempest (2012). Several of his Craiova productons garnered tremendous acclaim at important theatre festivals (Avignon, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Melbourne, Glasgow, Bath, Varna, Gdansk, Sarajevo). In 1989, he directed Boccaccio's The Decameron at the Anton Pann Theatre in Râmnicu Vâlcea, and later on in 1995, with the backing of British producers, mounted a large-scale production titled Les Danaides, which featured more than 100 performers on stage and likewise provoked gushing reviews at numerous international theatre festivals. Between 1992 and 1996, he served as the general director of the Bulandra Theatre, and from 1996 until 2002 ran the Centre Dramatique National de Limoges, where he also founded a drama academy. Since 2001, he has regularly directed productions (some of them international co-productions) at the Radu Stanca Theatre in Nagyszeben (Sibiu), including Riz pilaf et parfum d'âne (based on the Arabian Nights, 2001), Pantagruel's Sister-in-Law (based on Rabelais, 2003), Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (2005), Goethe's Faust (2007), Frank Wedekind's Lulu (2008), Metamorphoses (based on Ovid, 2009) and Ion Luca Caragiale's Carnival (2011). His production of Faust enjoyed overwhelming success in Edinburgh in 2009, and his Gulliver's Travels, which he was commissioned to stage along with the Sibiu company by the Edinburgh International Festival, won him the Herald Angel Award from the Bank of Scotland in 2012. He has worked in many countries, including in England (the Royal Shakespeare Company, Nottingham Playhouse), Austria (Burghtheater), France (Thèâtre de l’Union), Norway (Bergen's Den Nationale Scene and Det Norske Teatret-Oslo), Portugal (São João Theatre) and Hungary (Budapest's Katona József Theatre and National Theatre and the Csokonai Theatre of Debrecen). He also regularly conducts opera, with his most important opera productions consisting of La bohème (Essen), Parsifal (Scotland), Roberto Devereux (Wiener Staatsoper), Castor et Pollux (Bonn), Péter Eötvös's Love and Other Demons (at the Glyndebourne Festival and in Vilnius), Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel (Csokonai Theatre of Debrecen, named best production at the Armel Opera Festival) and Rachmaninoff's Aleko and Francesca da Rimini (Buenos Aires). He directed his first film, Somewhere in Palilula, in Romania in 2010. He has been an individual member of the Union of European Theatres since 2003. He currently makes his home in Paris.
