ABSTRACT
Peter Stein began working on Shakespeare relatively late in his career, and his productions can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. While most young directors cannot wait to take on the challenge of Shakespeare, Stein’s first production, As You Like It, opened just days before his fortieth birthday. Until then he had made his name with spectacular and intelligent productions of contemporary pieces like Edward Bond’s Saved (Munich, 1967) and Early Morning (Zurich, 1969); German classics like Schiller’s Intrigue and Love (Bremen, 1967) and Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (Bremen, 1969); and by causing a furore with his provocative staging of a play about the USA’s involvement in Vietnam, Peter Weiss’s Vietnam-Discourse (Munich, 1968; Berlin, 1969). In 1970 he cofounded a theatre collective in Berlin, based at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer, where, as their leading director, he staged a succession of striking productions, including Brecht’s The Mother (1970), Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1971), Kleist’s Prince of Homburg (1972) and Gorky’s Summerfolk (1974).
