Timothy O’Brien
Designer
Educated at Cambridge University 1949-52 and as a Henry Fellow and Fulbright Scholar at the Yale School of Drama 1952-3, his career began in television at the BBC in 1954. From 1956-65, he was Head of Design of ABC Televisions. As an Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1966, he has designed 31 productions for the company, in particular productions of Troilus and Cressida, and Richard II, directed by John Barton; The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Terry Hands and Enemies, Summerfolk, The Lower Depths and The Zykovs all by Maxim Gorky, directed by David Jones. His designs for the National Theatre include Next of Kin, directed by Harold Pinter; John Gabriel Borkman, directed by Peter Hall and Tales from the Vienna Woods, directed by Maximilian Schell. He designed his fi rst opera, Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, in 1958 for Sadler’s Wells and has since designed operas for Covent Garden, ENO, the Vienna State Opera, the Kirov in Leningrad, La Scala, Milan, and opera houses in Berlin, Adelaide, Sydney, Cologne, Oslo, Amsterdam, Geneva and Lisbon. The best known of these have been Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden, directed by Peter Hall; The Bassarids, directed by Hans Werner Henze; Peter Grimes and Wozzeck, directed by Elijah Moshinsky; Lulu, directed by Gotz Friedrich and Luciano Berio’s Outis and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, directed by Graham Vick. In 1978, he designed the Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita in partnership with Tazeena Firth, directed by Harold Prince. At the Prague Quadriennale, he was joint winner of the Gold Medal for set design in 1976; and in 1991 joint winner of the Golden Triga for the best national exhibit. From 1984-1991, he was Chairman of the Society of British Theatre Designers and in 1991 he was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry. In 1997, he married the designer Jenny Jones.