Neville John Tranter

Neville Tranter (1955, Toowoomba, Australia) completed his drama studies with US director Robert Gist in Australia in 1976, after a traineeship with the Billbar Puppet Theatre. He founded his own Stuffed Puppet Theatre the same year. After having taken part in a big street theatre festival in Amsterdam in 1978, Tranter decided to settle permanently in that city, where his visual and emotional adult puppet theatre developed to assume its present form.
His combination of down to earth humour, deadly seriousness and virtuoso puppetry, often using life size puppets, won him international acclaim, both as puppeteer as well as director.
He treated controversial subjects such as „Schicklgruber, alias Adolf Hitler“, about the last days of Hitler and his entourage, and „Punch & Judy in Afghanistan“, about western arrogance versus Taliban cruelty. More recently he portrayed life in a nursing home, where financial considerations play a bigger role than the well being of its old aged residents („Mathilde“) and „Babylon” about boat refugees.
In 2021 Tranter wrote and performed with Nikolaus Habjan „The Hills are alive“, a production of Schauspielhaus Graz.
Tranter has a special interest in the combination of puppetry and opera.
With Holland Diep Tranter took part in 2005 in the realization of a Xenakis opera: „Oresteia”.
In 2008 he directed „Acis and Galatea“ by Georg Friedrich Händel and in 2010 “Dido and Aeneas” by Henry Purcell with „Die Freitagsakademie“ (Bern). In 2013 he directed „La Maison qui chante“ by Betsy Jolas with Compagnie Le Carosse d’Or, Paris.
In „The Tales of Hoffmann" (Offenbach), Neville Tranter staged the Antonia act.