Mike Poulton

Who is Mike Poulton?

Mike Poulton is an English translator and adapter of classic plays for contemporary audiences.

Poulton began his career in 1995 with Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Ivan Turgenev's Fortune's Fool, which were staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre, the former with Derek Jacobi, the latter with Alan Bates. Bates reprised his role for a 2002 Broadway production that earned Poulton a Tony Award nomination for Best Play.

Poulton's subsequent works include Chekov's Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and The Seagull, Euripides' Ion, Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Ghosts, August Strindberg's The Father and Dance of Death.

His adaptation of Friedrich von Schiller's Don Carlos was performed at the Chichester and in the West End with Derek Jacobi. Charlotte Loveridge has written, "Mike Poulton's new translation has superb lucidity and pace. Purging Schiller of any hint of verbosity or bombast, the text is full of deft shifts of register from the boldly poetic to the colloquial. As Posa asks the king, "You wish to plant a garden that will flower forever./Why do you water it with blood?" Unafraid to employ vocabulary with contemporary significance, the translation nevertheless does not dogmatically confine the meaning of the play to an exclusively modern interpretation."