Obituary of Pierre Audi – founder of the Almeida theatre

Successfully combining the roles of administrator and director with rare distinction in the UK, Europe and America, Pierre Audi was one of the most revered figures in modern theatre and opera.

Audi was just 22 when he founded London’s Almeida Theatre in 1979, leading it for a decade before spending 30 years at Dutch National Opera, transforming its fortunes in the process. At the time of his sudden death, aged 67, he was director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in France and artistic director of New York’s Park Avenue Armory.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he had a peripatetic childhood following his banker father to Paris, where he was schooled, and then to England, where he read Oriental studies at Oxford University.

While there, he made his first venture into theatre, directing Timon of Athens with Philip Franks in the title role for the student drama society at the Oxford Playhouse in 1977.

On graduating, he announced himself with the audacious move of reclaiming a derelict toy factory and former Victorian Salvation Army citadel in Islington to become the Almeida Theatre.

It would, he said, "be a theatre space with a coherent policy and an internationalist outlook; distinguished by quality and novelty".

Over the next decade, Audi fought tenaciously to establish the venue as one of London’s most innovative and outward-looking producing companies. Uniquely, he programmed new opera and music alongside a theatre offering that brought a distinctly avant-garde and European aesthetic to the capital.
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He proved just as determined in arguing for greater funding for the arts, even as Margaret Thatcher’s government was imposing swingeing cuts. He campaigned against the abolition of the Greater London Council, the Almeida’s largest benefactor at the time by far, and took to task its successor, Greater London Arts, when it imposed potentially crippling cuts for what he considered spurious, politically motivated reasons.

The ideal qualities for an administrator, he told The Stage in 1988, were "bottle, taste and courage".

Despite dwindling support from the public purse, Audi oversaw a £240,000 refurbishment of the building in 1984, when he also created the venue’s first resident company of actors. Early stumbles gave way to notable successes, including the UK debut of Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1983), Alan Howard in War Music, Christopher Logue’s retelling of Homer’s Iliad (1984) and David Rudkin’s The Saxon Shore (1986).

His tenure also saw important new work from German playwright Botho Strauss and from Howard Barker (the Glenda Jackson-starring Scenes from an Execution), with a host of opera premieres – not least Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz (1987) and John Casken’s Golem (1989) – seen alongside innovative festivals dedicated to new music.

‘A creative visionary, a titan who shaped the cultural world for so many of us; generous, fascinating, and brilliant’ – New York’s Park Avenue Armory

The Almeida also welcomed companies such as Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord, Cheek By Jowl and Complicité, whose experimental, often physical sensibilities matched Audi’s own catholic tastes and outlook.

Among the emerging directors that Audi gave a platform to were Deborah Warner, Tim Ashley and Simon McBurney.

Current Almeida artistic director Rupert Goold said Audi was owed "a profound debt of thanks. His regime was the purest expression of values that remain central to the Almeida to this day – experimentalism, internationalism, integrity, playfulness and, above all, a celebration of new artists".

Exhausting wrangles over funding contributed to Audi leaving the Almeida in 1988 to take up directorship of the then-Netherlands Opera, where he made his mark by staging the country’s first complete Ring cycle.

Over the following three decades, he turned around the struggling company, renamed the Dutch National Opera, with the eclectic, cosmopolitan approach that had served him and the Almeida so well.

He found time to direct the British premiere of Verdi’s Jerusalem for Opera North in 1990 and to serve as artistic director of the annual Holland Festival in Amsterdam from 2005 to 2014 and of New York’s Park Avenue Armory from 2015.

At the Armory, he made good use of more generous funding conditions to commission headline-grabbing new work and engage directors Sam Mendes, Robert Icke, Peter Sellars and Ivo van Hove.

In a statement following his death, the venue described Audi as "a creative visionary, a titan who shaped the cultural world for so many of us; generous, fascinating, and brilliant".

In 2018, he stepped down from the Dutch National Opera to take the reins at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. There, he pursued a similar argument for work that was collaborative, innovative, cross-genre, challenging and, most essentially, pertinent and topical.
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The cast of Thebans at London Coliseum (2014). Photo: Tristram Kenton

Among his notable achievements in France were the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence (2021), George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Picture a Day Like This (2023) and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, seen at Home Manchester in 2023.

On a freelance basis, he worked as a guest director for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Paris Opéra, Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.

He made his English National Opera debut in 2014, directing the premiere of Julian Anderson’s Thebans, with a libretto by Frank McGuinness, that The Stage described as "a major new opera; a stark and brutal ancient world that sets up many uncomfortable modern resonances".

Such were Audi’s credentials as an administrator that he was tipped at the time of Brian McMaster stepping down from the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005 as his successor. More recently, he had been appointed creative partner for Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2021.

To many onlookers, Audi seemed to be forever sharpening the cutting edge of theatre and opera, emphasising the immediacy and relevance of their connections to the wider world and all the while insisting on the primacy of the artists he worked with and supported.

He was, said conductor Fabio Luisi, "a wonderful Renaissance man and a great artist, a true ‘uomo di teatro’”.

Pierre Audi was born on November 9, 1957, and died on May 3, aged 67. He is survived by his wife, Marieke Peters, and his children, Alexander and Sophia.