Roger Granville is the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of the Mascarade Opera Foundation in Florence which he established in 2019 with Francis Parham and Max Fane; the same trio that also founded The New Generation Festival in 2017.
After three years of critical success in the gardens of the Palazzo Corsini, The New Generation Festival moved to the larger Boboli Gardens of the Palazzo Pitti in 2020 as ‘The ReGeneration Festival’ in partnership with the Uffizi Galleries in order to support hundreds of performing artists at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Roger has led international theatre productions at the Young Vic Theatre, The Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai and Shakespeare’s Globe, with whom he co-produced a project in 2012 to encourage the revival of the performing arts in Afghanistan, culminating with an Afghan touring production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Other producing credits include Oliver Dench’s One-Man Hamlet at the Théâtre National de Nice, Waiting for Godot at the Arcola Theatre, and Much Ado About Nothing at the Rose Theatre Kingston. For the New Generation Festival, he directed Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as well as assisting with the direction of The Three Divas, co-produced with the 23Arts Initiative at the Boboli Gardens in Florence. He has directed Sir Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love at the Oxford Playhouse and worked as an assistant director at both St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Alongside his co-founders, Roger was appointed Honorary Ambassador of the City of Florence and was honoured with the city’s Silver Florin decoration. He was educated at Eton College followed by Christ Church college at the University of Oxford where he was elected as an Exhibitioner and took a First in Middle Eastern Studies and Modern Languages (M.A. Oxon).
