Kent, Nicolas

Nicolas Kent is a British director and producer of theatre, television, and radio. His father was a Jewish refugee from Germany, who arrived in Britain in 1936. After graduating from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge with an English degree in 1967, Nicolas Kent worked as an ABC TV trainee regional theatre director at Liverpool Playhouse. Later, he worked at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, before becoming administrative director of the Oxford Playhouse Company from 1976 to 1981. He was artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre, London from 1984 to 2012. Kent has directed productions in over 100 theatres, including the West End and New York. He also directed plays for prestigious British companies, such as the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Young Vic.

Nicolas Kent is especially renowned for his work at the Tricycle, which included verbatim political plays, also known as the Tricycle Tribunal plays: The Colour of Justice, NurembergSrebrenicaBloody Sunday (which won him an Olivier Award for Special Achievement), and Guantanamo The Riots. His cycle of twelve short plays, The Great Game – Afghanistan, was performed as a trilogy in 2009 and was nominated for an Olivier Award. Under his direction, the Tricycle Theatre also staged many Irish productions and plays with a focus on Afro-Caribbean experience.

His latest productions include the 2014 world premiere of Rashid Razaq’s The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes, Another World by Gillian Slovo at the National Theatre, and Drones, Baby, Drones at the Arcola Theatre in 2016. In 2017, Kent directed his play All the President’s Men? in a co-production between the Public Theater in New York and the National Theatre in London. In 2018, he directed and co-produced Mark Thomas’ Check-Up: Our NHS @ 70 at the Traverse Theatre and the Arcola Theatre. Nicolas Kent is currently patron of MUJU, the Tricycle Muslim Jewish Youth Theatre Group.

For more information visit http://nicolaskent.com.