Peter’s friends
The Scotsman, 15th
July 2003, Joyce McMillan
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.
But the defining influence on his work seems to
have come in his early years at the Schaubuhne, between 1972 and 1980, when he
became director of an independent theatre in West Berlin with lavish levels of
funding, and – in the political spirit of the time – chose to run his big
Schaubuhne company almost as a workers’ collective, in which every member, from
the chief executive to the junior carpenter, would have an equal say in
determining artistic policy and direction. In practical terms, this
revolutionary model for running a theatre company never quite worked. But the
idea or ideal of it unleashed a huge amount of creative energy, attracted the
most intelligent and engaged of actors, and created the atmosphere of total
immersion in, and responsibility for, the work that underpinned the huge
artistic success of the Schaubuhne in the 1970s and early 1980s.
And the result of that deep involvement in the
detail and background of texts was a company increasingly famous for creating
whole shimmering worlds into which the audience could enter; and for what the
Scottish playwright David Greig calls “a real, profound exploration of what
naturalism in the theatre might actually mean, as opposed to the quick,
rough-and-ready imitation of naturalism we see so often in British theatre”.
So that when people reach for words to describe the
experience of a Stein production, they often talk first of the way Stein led
them into a new space, into the crumbling, sunlit, bleached-birch rural world
of ‘Uncle Vanya’, or to the edge of the great, expansive tilted stage on which
he played out his ‘Cherry Orchard’.
But in the end, too, they always talk about actors;
about the spine-tingling visceral force of Gert Voss’s Mark Antony as he cried
havoc and unleashed the dogs of war, or the unforgettable merry sadness of
Jutta Lampe’s Ranevskaya in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ “You can debate for ever about
all the methods Stein uses as a director,” says McMaster, “about his scenic
sense, his obsession with text, his deep research into history and period. But
in the end, it’s all at the service of one thing, and that is to get
extraordinary performances out of actors.
“In that respect, he is simply a master of what he
does, and he will be again, this summer.”
Return to
Production Information