Conor Hanratty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Conor Hanratty (born 11 July 1981) is a theatre director and scholar.
Hanratty was born in Dublin, Ireland and attended Trinity College, Dublin and Royal Holloway, University of London before receiving a Japanese Government Scholarship to study at Waseda University, Tokyo.
He won Best Overall Production and Best Technical Production for his production of his own translation of Euripides' Medea at the ISDA awards in Limerick, Ireland, March 2002. The translation was also awarded the Mullins Classical Exhibition in 2001.
Hanratty's production of The Bacchae was created (and, again, newly translated) for the Debut 02 festival at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Dublin, in November/December 2002, and the production was re-staged the following year as part of the "Rebel Women" conference on Greek Tragedy at the Samuel Beckett Centre. Hanratty continued his work on Greek theatre during an MA at Royal Holloway in 2004, when he co-created and scripted a new version of Euripides' Trojan Women, re-titled "Troy's Fallen", working with a cast of Greek, Cypriot and American actresses.
He directed Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" in Tokyo in October 2005. In November 2006 he co-ordinated and directed an evening of short plays by Samuel Beckett in an important Noh theatre in Tokyo.
The main focus of Hanratty's academic research has been on the theatre of Yukio Ninagawa. His MA thesis was "Ninagawa's Oedipus Rex - Classical Theatre for a Postmodern Audience", and Hanratty has given papers on the Japanese master-director in Egham, Dublin, Toronto, Epidaurus, Prague, Helsinki and Tokyo. His book "A World Reflected: The Theatre of Ninagawa Yukio" is forthcoming.
Hanratty is also a regular participant and organiser at the Intensive Summer Course of the European Network for the Research and Documentation of Ancient Greek Drama, in Epidaurus, Greece.
His theatre company is called Mnemosyne Productions, after Mnemosyne in Greek myth, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses.
