Former theater revolutionary Peter Stein turns 85.
Photo: imago images/Eventpress
Dear Peter Stone,
unknown to you, I congratulate you on your 85th birthday! We’ve never met, you’ve been living very well for a number of years lontano – away from the theatrical events of your former workplaces. (The documentary »Lontano – Die Schaubühne von Peter Stein« by Andreas Lewin means even more with the Italian term – I will come back to that.) And I have to admit that I am not a fan of your productions, the authors wanted to serve, and before especially not of your interviews of the last decades.
But you are very present to me as a young theater maker, as a self-confessed left-wing director of bourgeois origin, as the then officially anti-authoritarian theater director of the West Berlin Schaubühne, who publicly showed interest in the abolition of the directorship and at the same time supported his colleagues for years in the common collective Work has motivated and gathered. Of course we know today (in two senses) the progress of the then very hopeful, militant theatrical awakening in the Federal Republic of Germany. But more than half a century ago, together with others, you asked the right and important questions about your own actions. Even the production processes of what we call theater as a product, you and your politically alert colleagues wanted to radically change. (Yes, there were women, but unfortunately really not many – and that was Not because the colleagues simply would have liked the status quo of bourgeois theater production so much.)
Criticism and new beginnings were in the air in 1968, today’s atmosphere is very different, but the consistency and reflection (despite the blind spots!) with which you repeatedly tried to get together (you never were alone) making theater in the hope of promoting a fundamental socio-political alternative to capitalist conditions impresses me.
I like to remind you that the (radical) democratic attempts at a breakthrough back then (not only at the West Berlin Schaubühne or the Schauspiel Frankfurt, in Bremen, Kassel, Heidelberg, Saarbrücken, Dortmund, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen …) had the same goal today regularly criticized the blatant contradiction between the publicly communicated emancipatory claim of theater workers and their working practice, which is characterized by dependency relationships and conformism backstage (within the state-funded institutions) to overcome.
At the beginning of 1969, when, among other things, you were an assistant director fired from the Munich Kammerspiele for agitation of the audience (as part of your collective production »Viet Nam Diskurs« donations were collected to finance weapons for the Vietcong), you staged Goethe’s »Tasso« at the Bremen theater of all things allowed – a great success with the critics. Did that make you happy? Together with the author Yaak Karsunke you wrote in the program booklet about the staging work: »Goethes Torquato Tasso is the drama of the superfluous (ie, luxurious) icing of fine art that is smothered onto unnecessary misery to make it palatable. […] We know, that [auch] we satisfy these expectations with our production […]. We fill in the roles provided and please the gaze of the powerful with artistic contortions and cramps. We share with the powerless audience the inability to articulate our own anger and pain – perhaps we have an awareness of this inability ahead of them.«
The text conveys such serious insights into the trap of the high culture institution Stadttheater, which is said to be dedicated to “art”, into its ineffectiveness when it comes to questioning existing power relations, that it is remarkable how you have nevertheless continued. The hope lay in the total transformation of the theater institution, its function and specifically its organizational structure and working methods – the Schaubühne am Hallesches Ufer was to become a place for this experiment. It seems to me that you have not been able to clarify the question of what this new »theater of self-determination« – not »co-determination«, as you repeatedly emphasized and which is still erroneously asserted today – wanted from its audience.
Even before your official start at the Schaubühne, the viewers of your updated »Viet Nam Discourse« production were first accused and locked up as US collaborators thanks to left-wing radicals, and then, thanks to you and the management team at the time, cleared by the police or »liberated«. In your opening production of Brecht’s »The Mother«, the audience was still addressed directly, the bright red flag in front of their noses was supposed to herald the revolutionary wind.
Then you and your comrades-in-arms shifted to taking care of yourself first. They trained in Marxism-Leninism, formed working groups to prepare for production, held plenary sessions and typed up interesting minutes, by today’s standards they really took a lot of time for discussions and experiments or reading-oriented rehearsals and worked together on the stage sets – that says a lot about the in the Lack of (financial) resources in the early years, which was ideally compensated for by a high level of personal and joint commitment.
As a thank you, the productions, which were mostly developed with a large number of actors* and which certainly tried out new spaces and dramaturgies, were noticed nationwide, praised or criticized by the critics and eagerly attended by the audience. At some point you yourself called Brecht “not complex enough” and soon became interested in Shakespeare, Chekhov and ancient dramas. You have received many awards and honors, put on mammoth productions of up to 22 hours (e.g. the »Faust« project in 2000) and asked the audience directly with the actors during the »Tasso« break in 1969 »Do you need art? If so: what for?” no longer want to have answered in detail.
Now you live enraptured in the middle of Italy. I know what it looks like there from Lewin’s documentary from 2013: really beautiful, an old stone house, stylishly modernized with glass fronts, views over the wide landscape, oak forests, cornfields, vineyards, bathing lake, lots of peace and quiet. In fact, so much so that you also invite guests to your place, “Welcome to San Pancrazio between 600-year-old olive trees,” you write on the home page of your property. The accommodation can be booked online, there is handmade olive oil, jams, wild boar sausage.
For real lontano, far away is the old, then new Schaubühne in Kreuzberg, is the press conference at which you, with long hair, just over 30 years old and almost appearing shy, announced in the midst of the theater comrades sitting closely around you which approach They would have agreed together: »that we are interested in making a theater based on the desire to change the world in which we live«. The desire to do theater and the desire to change the world are no longer so naturally linked – it is a long, winding path between the world and the theatre. They survived – Chapeau!
