Laurent Pelly is a French stage director, born in Paris in 1962. In 1980, at the age of 18, he founded his own theatre company, Le Pelican, which he co-leads with Agathe Mélinand since 1989.
During the first twenty years of his career, he devoted himself to theater, and in 1997 he was appointed director of the Centre dramatique national des Alpes-Grenoble (the National Dramatic Center of Alpes-Grenoble). In the same year, he gave fresh impetus to his career with Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), the first lyric work of a long series of operas he staged in France and abroad: from the tons of the opéra bouffe by Offenbach, like Orphée and La Belle Hélène (The Beautiful Helen), or like Platée (Plataea) by Jean-Philippe Rameau, to the more tragic atmospheres of La Voix humaine (The Human Voice) by Poulenc, Le Château de Barbe-Bleue (The Castle of the Blue-Bearded Duke) by Bartók, and Pelléas et Mélisande (Pelléas and Mélisande) by Debussy.
In January 2008 Laurent Pelly was appointed joint director – along with Agathe Mélinand – of the Théâtre National de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées (TNT).
