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 The Seagull