We are delighted to be working with Royston Coppenger on our production of August Strindberg’s Playing with Fire. As a long-time friend and collaborator of The Private Theatre, Royston has made key artistic contributions to our productions. He is creating a new adaptation of Strindberg’s text exclusively for The Private Theatre, one that brings to the forefront the passions and torments of human beings, with which the Swedish playwright was obsessed. With his daring work, Royston will allow us to fulfill our objective for this production, to stage a version of Playing with Fire that fully realizes the themes and preoccupations of Strindberg in a bold, contemporary way.

About Royston Coppenger

Royston Coppenger contributed the autobiographical piece “Ghost/King” to John Gould Rubin’s 1968 for the Labyrinth Theater’s Barn Series in 2009, and prepared the new English version of Hedda Gabler for The Private Theatre’s site-specific production in a New York City townhouse in 2010, also directed by John Gould Rubin. His award-winning translations of Bernard-Marie Koltès’ plays Roberto Zucco, In the Loneliness of the Cottonfields and Key West have been produced across the United States. Additional original plays and performance pieces staged in New York include Hopper, Moses, The Killer Inside Me, and The Last American In Paris/Le Dernier Americain à Paris (with John Gould Rubin and Travis Preston).  Royston Coppenger’s extensive New York directing credits include Orpheus in the Underworld and The Tender Land for the Bronx Opera, The Great White Hope and Fahrenheit 451 for the Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, and the world premieres of Carne Ross’ The Fox and Stevan Arbona’s Saturn’s Children at HERE.  His ongoing series of short films Das Kapital: The Movie have been shown at Anthology Film Archives and Oakland International Film Festival. Royston Coppenger holds a Doctor of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama. He is currently Professor of Drama at Hofstra University.