Peter Stein

It's  amazing to me that Peter Stein is now called the veteran stage director. 

In 'the stone age' as he put it he was the most exciting and radical new talent in West Germany. Such were reports of his work that I made a trip to the Schaubuehne am Halleschen Ufer in West Berlin to see his production of Wischnewski's 'Optimistische Tragoedie,' 

Stein had become associated with the Schaubuehne. You can't say he was their Intendant or Artistic Director because he instituted a decision making process whereby every member of the company, down to the cloakroom staff took part all decision making including artistic decisions. Apprently this didn't work very well because it all took a great deal of time and in the end Stein turned out to be 'more equal than others.'

The performance I saw was unforgettable. The Schaubuehne was a small rectangular space with seating on two sides. on the other two sides was a battleship or at least the suggestion of a battleship. Actors negotiated all the decks, nooks and crannies of this construction giving a convincing impression that what we were seeing was indeed happening on a battleship. 

In parenthesis, I'll just mention that this was not the only Stein production to take place on a ship. He directed Eugene O'Neill's 'The hairy ape' which deals with the life of a stoker in the bowels of a passenger ship and his relationship with the passengers on the top decks. In that production you saw into the entire ship in a proscenium setting.

I followed Stein, meeting him in Brussels. I remember having lunch with him in the canteen of the Theatre de la Monnaie. I saked him if he would ever consider working at Covent Garden. My question was put in such a way as to take into consideration any principals he may have had about working in such a plutocratic environment.

His answer was 'I'll work on a pile of shit if I have the right conditions.'

From here if I may I would like to reproduce an article from The Scotsman in 2003 paying tribute to Stein at the height of his career and to Brian McMaster who brought him first to Welsh National Opera and then to the Edinburgh Festival;

For Edinburgh International Festival Director Brian McMaster, it all began in the spring of 1977, when Peter Stein’s legendary production of Maxim Gorky’s ‘Summerfolk’ made a brief nine-day appearance at the National Theatre in London, as the first foreign language production ever seen there.

At that time, Peter Stein was just 40, and had already been director of the Schambuhne Theatre in Berlin for five years, building a formidable reputation as one of the most thrilling directors in Europe. But nothing had prepared McMaster – who had just taken on a new job at Welsh National Opera – for the impact of this tremendous production, staged on real earth among a grove of real birch trees, and already five years in the maturing when it appeared in London. “I just knew,” he says, “that I was looking at the work of a truly great director, and that I wanted to bring his work to British audiences, if I possibly could.”

And over the last 20 years, McMaster has kept that promise in spectacular style. In Cardiff, he persuaded an initially reluctant Stein to stage a series of memorable opera productions; and when McMaster arrived in Edinburgh in 1991, one of his first thoughts was to include Stein’s work in the Festival drama programme. In 1993, Stein’s production of ‘Julius Caesar’ famously played in an old aircraft hangar at Ingliston neat Edinburgh airport. In 1994, the Festival presented his ‘Oresteia’ at Murrayfield ice rink. And in 1996 and 1997, Edinburgh caught its first glimpse of Stein’s special relationship with Chekhov, when his Italian ‘Uncle Vanya’ played at the King’s Theatre, and his mighty Salzburg production of ‘The Cherry Orchard’ at the Festival Theatre.

And this year, that relationship between Stein and the Festival – and between Stein and Chekhov – is set to reach a new level, as Stein works for the first time with British-based actors, in English, to stage his first-ever production of ‘The Seagull’, with the inimitable Fiona Shaw leading a glittering cast that includes Iain Glen, Jodhi May, and the wonderful Michael Pennington. “To hear Stein talk about Chekhov is a phenomenal experience,” says McMaster. “He really is obsessed with the beauty and potential of those plays; so much so that the Russians themselves perceive him as the major director of Chekhov of our time.”

So what is the magical Stein quality which has made such a profound impression on a generation of European theatre-goers? In one sense, his gift is notoriously hard to define; he is, as Brian McMaster says, “the text director par excellence”, deeply focused on the particular text in hand.

Stein's unforgettable productions for WNO included 'Otello,' 'Falstaff,' 'Pelleas et Melisande' and 'Peter Grimes.' For Pelleas WNO managed to pair him with Pierre Boules as conductor. I expect the lure for both of them was to work with the other. Certainly weeks and weeks in Cardiff was not the attraction. Apparently Boulez  called it 'The end of the world.'

One last personal memory; I attended Stein's first meeting with the WNO company at the beginning of the 'Peter Grimes' rehearsal period. In that meeting with the whole company gathered around (maybe also cloakroom staff?) he gave what was one of the greatest lectures I ever heard from anyone during my academic career or even on radio (Isaiah Berlin) or elsewhere.

Now referred to as 'veteran' he seems out of the limelight. His most recent production appears to have been 'Le nozze di Figaro' in Malmo. Malmo has one of the biggest stages in Europe and Ingmar Bergman worked there so it's not exactly 'a pile of shit' but it seems curious career-wise that is where this great man should be right now.

NB. Brian McMaster told me as a student, Stein had travelled to the UK and workd at a petrol station to learn English.