Joseph Graves
Artistic Director
Joseph Graves has lived and worked in China as a theatre director since 2002. In 2004, he became the artistic director of Peking University’s Institute of World Theatre and Film. Since coming to China, he has produced and/or directed more than 70 plays, in both English and Chinese. These include many of Shakespeare’s plays along with other classical Western plays, as well as several musicals, and a number of Eastern plays, and operas. 15 of these plays have been the Chinese premieres of Western pieces.
Before coming to China, Graves worked as a director, actor and writer for both stage and film chiefly in America and Great Britain, though his work has been seen in France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the Middle East as well. His directing work in the West has included major productions of dramas, comedies, operas and musical theatre from London’s West End in England, to New York and Los Angeles in the US. In regional theatres and Shakespeare Festivals throughout the America and England, he has staged the works of such playwrights as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Moliere, Gozzi, Miller, Albee, Williams, Wilde, Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Lorca, and many others.
As an actor he has played such Shakespearean roles as King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Richard II, Coriolanus, Othello, Iago, Romeo, Falstaff, Prospero, Titus Andronicus and Timon, to name only a few. He has also performed leading roles in numerous other plays: Lennie in Of Mice and Men, Willy Loman in Death of A Salesman, Peer Gynt in Peer Gynt, Uncle Vanya in Uncle Vanya, Tartuffe in Tartuffe and Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes, among many others. His numerous musical theatre credits include: Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady, Don Quixotein Man of LaMancha, Arthur in Camelot, Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, Curly McLain in Oklahoma and Petruchio in Kiss Me Kate.
His plays, such as Revoco, Bunyan, and Word Circus, have received productions at such venues as The Wilshire Theatre in Los Angeles, Perth Repertory Theatre in Great Britain and The Moscow Art Theatre in Russia.
In Hollywood he has written and/or acted for such well-known companies as Viacom, Warner Brothers, Colombia and Universal Studios. He wrote and is currently directing the film, How I Became a Shadow, based on the life of Zhu Shenghao, the first to translate nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays into Chinese. The film is scheduled for release on the Mainland in the fall of 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Zhu Shenghao’s birth.
Cheng Zhaoxiang