You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (October 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the German article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Peter Stein]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Peter Stein}} to the talk page.
Peter Stein (born 1 October 1937) is a German theatre and opera director who established himself at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a company that he brought to the forefront of German theatre.[1]
Biography
Born in Berlin, Stein grew up in an era defined by the Nazis. His father, Herbert Stein, was factory director of Alfred Teves, a motorcycle manufacturing firm that the Nazi regime employed to make automotive parts. Herbert was in charge of 250,000 forced laborers. He was also involved in the Confessing Church, a resistance group.
Stein has said that these events had a profound effect on his life. After the war, his father was sentenced to two years of forced labor for collaborating with the Nazis. Stein's academic performance nosedived and he barely made it into Frankfurt University. He then moved to Munich and enrolled at university there, pursuing a PhD thesis on the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann.
The theatre where Stein originally worked in West Berlin was the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer [de]. He joined it in 1970 and soon became its director, running it as an egalitariansocialistdemocracy. The success of his productions at the small theatre enabled him to move to a new space in 1981, which was built according to his wishes inside the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. After the end of his relationship with partner Jutta Lampe in 1985, Stein left the Schaubühne.
The award of the 14th Europe Theatre Prize to Peter Stein, the creator of monumental productions often staged in unusual spaces, celebrates the career of one of the most important figures of German and European theatre in the second half of the 20th century.
Since the end of the 1960s, Peter Stein, leader and “demiurge” of an extraordinary collective, has succeeded in regenerating theatre in Germany and Germanic areas. He has enriched it with his interest in exploratory work on the actor and the scenic space, the text and timing, which – following a German and central European tradition – manifest in a provocative expression of politics, philology, collective artistic creation, revelations of history and a re-examination of the critical and social function of theatre in today’s world. The experience of “his” collective, beginning in 1970 at the Schaubühne in Berlin with Bruno Ganz, Edith Clever, Jutta Lampe, Michael König and other actors, redefined the meaning of theatre work in terms that quite soon were recognisable as Steinian. Alternating reinterpretations of Ibsen, von Kleist, Brecht, Gorky, Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Chekhov with productions of Edward Bond, Peter Handke and Botho Strauss, the work evolved constantly, with a framework, method and choices through which Stein directed his actors and collaborators along a shared, highly engrossing path, at once artistic and political, that marked a particular period of the Berlin and European scene. Since then, Peter Stein has continued to take on an impressive range of material, from myth, classics, and opera to contemporary drama and film. His rigorous, relentless work, his determined explorations undaunted by geographic or linguistic barriers, continues to provide European theatre with reinterpretations and works of such remarkable intensity and meaning that we are forced to recognise theatre as an active, living body, with a distinct role in our era. Peter Stein’s vitality, vast cultural knowledge and passion for every aspect of theatre work have driven him in recent years towards new creations and activities. He has staged a number of operas, particularly from the Russian repertoire, and in Russia presented a memorable adaptation of the Oresteia. He also has two recent publications: the well-received essay My Chekhov and Essayer encore, échouer toujours, a book in which he discusses his work in an interview with Georges Banu. For some years now, Stein has been living in Italy, following his marriage to actress Maddalena Crippa. There, among his other European and Italian activities, he has created and even personally handled the production aspects of a Faust Fantasia by Goethe and a theatrical reinterpretation of The Demons by Dostoyevsky, a play which was instantly acclaimed as the greatest theatrical event of recent times. Peter Stein’s wide-ranging mastery and spirit of tireless exploration, as evidenced by these accomplishments, continue to offer new perspectives, teachings and inspiration to theatre around the world.[6]
Major productions
Productions without a specified location were at the Schaubühne Berlin.[7]
