On a hillside at San Pancrazio in Tuscany, where Peter Stein's complex of sandstone buildings glows against the olive groves, work is under way on his new production of The Seagull. Further down the hill there is a glittering pool and a hefty kiln, where Stein's Italian wife Maddalena bakes pizza. "There really couldn't be a better place to prepare for The Seagull", she says. "There is something very Chekhovian about the life here." As if to illustrate the point a sudden storm slices through the heat with driving rain and hail. Stein is fond of quoting Masha's complaint in Three Sisters about the volatility of her native Russia: "It's bad enough in a climate like this," runs the line, "because it will snow before you know where you are."
After the squall the heat returns, and life resumes its lazy pace, with the actors lounging around, strumming guitars, discussing the latest news from home, playing croquet on the lawn, much in the manner of their characters. "Oh, what could be duller than this dear tedium of the country?" as Arkadina, The Seagull's actress protagonist, exclaims in Act II, "The air is hot and still, nobody does anything but sit and philosophise about life..."
This spirit of verisimilitude has always governed Stein's work. As important as rehearsals are the extended periods of extracurricular research: a cruise around the sites of ancient Greece for his 1974 Antikenprojekt; a trek around Warwickshire for his landmark As You Like It in 1977; and for The Seagull, which premieres in Edinburgh on Monday, the cast has already made a pilgrimage to Taganrog, Chekhov's birthplace. Stein's genius is to make all of this research live on stage: "Peter is one of the greats," says producer Thelma Holt, who brought his production of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape to the National Theatre in 1987. "He is short-tempered when the occasion arises but there is a part of him that has the patience of Job, and it manifests itself in the diligence with which he applies himself to the work - he has this incredible attention to detail."
It is often forgotten now that Stein began as a radical left-winger shaped by the upheavals of the 1968 student uprisings. The theatre he ran until 1985, Berlin's Schaubühne, was founded in 1970 as a collective, where every decision was voted on even by front-of-house and maintenance staff. He tackled political works such as Peter Weiss's anti-war tract Vietnam-Discourse (1968) and Brecht's revolutionary fable The Mother (1970). When he moved on to classics such as Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1971), The Oresteia (1980) and Three Sisters (1984), he was attacked from the left for producing "delicatessen theatre". By the end of the 80s, Stein had established the Schaubühne as Germany's foremost company.
Since leaving the Schaubühne in 1985, Stein has continued to challenge audiences, with a Russian version of The Oresteia in 1994 and a mammoth staging of Faust in 2000. He detests multimedia and imagistic theatre and his obsession with the ultimate sanctity of the text has been criticised as outmoded. Disciples disagree: "Peter is hugely radical," says Edinburgh Festival artistic director Brian McMaster, who has brought much of Stein's work to the UK. "We've got all these multimedia directors at the moment, which is fine. But that is exactly why the simple act of going back to the text is the most radical thing that you could do now. "
Stein has lived in Italy since the early 90s but moved to San Pancrazio only in 1999, taking over and renovating a derelict farmhouse. Despite his patriarchal role, it is Maddalena Crippa, an exuberant actress and singer - whom he met a decade earlier but only married in 1999 - who is the dominant presence. At meals with the company he can come across as distracted, even curmudgeonly. Production staff at the other end of the table grumble that they are ignored.
According to Fiona Shaw, who plays the fading Arkadina in the Edinburgh production of The Seagull - which is Stein's first English-language production, with a British and Irish cast - Stein manages somehow to both control and liberate: "In terms of the text, he is an emotional despot," she says. "There is a frame being offered of such architectural beauty, but what is within that is highly charged. He builds a cathedral in which moment by moment explosions can occur." Otto Sander, one of the principal actors at the Schaubühne, sums up the Stein approach: "He is like a combination of a university professor and a child. He is childish in a good sense, looking at the world with wide-open eyes. But he can also back this up with learning and knowledge of aesthetics, about the history of theatre, about everything."
Initially, Stein was reluctant to take on The Seagull, his least favourite of the Chekhov plays: "It is so difficult for me to introduce comic elements which are so very strong in The Seagull," he says wryly, "because you know I have no sense of humour. I am a German and I like tragedies very much and I do them quite well."
However, he has discovered the play's merits in rehearsal, beginning, as always, from his guiding principle: "I explore a masterpiece," he says, "to find out what it is, how it works, what were the ideas of the person who made it, what is behind it to decipher. And then I transmit that to the group of people who will recreate it... and transmit this understanding to the public. And then other people can experience this piece of art. This is my credo - very banal and very simple."
Peter Stein was born on October 1, 1937, in Berlin, just as the Nazis were preparing for war. His father, Herbert Stein, was an entrepreneur who, in the 1920s, ran a factory manufacturing motorcycles (which, his son proudly boasts, he also raced). He rose to the status of factory director of a company called Alfred Teves, which supplied vehicle parts for the German military: "He was in charge of about 250,000 forced labourers," says Stein. "What was most amazing was that, while collaborating [with the Nazis], he was a member of the Protestant group called the Confessing Church, which was close to the resistance. Like so many Germans, he just moved ahead without thinking."
In 1943, Peter was evacuated to East Prussia and then in stages moved further west in advance of the collapsing front until his mother arrived to collect him after the surrender in 1945.
The eight-year-old's experience of the chaos had a profound impact: "For four weeks we travelled through the ruins of Germany," he says. "You had these trains from the east packed with destitute people, and on top of this you had the bombing, with the air raid sirens constantly going off. It became a kind of recurring dream for me that I was in one of these locomotives and I look back and see the bombs crashing down. At a bend in the rails I look back and see the people burning and screaming."
After the war, Herbert Stein's economic collaboration with the Nazi regime led to prosecution as a "mitlaufer" or "fellow traveller" and he was sentenced to two years forced labour, working on the railroads in Zollhaus-Blumberg, a village on the Swiss border. Once his sentence was over, Herbert embraced the German economic miracle and in 1953 moved the family to Frankfurt to work as a production specialist for Alfred Teves, where he had worked during the Nazi era: "The miracle was carried out by the same people who had run the economy before," says Stein. "It was the same engineers, the same organisers. In the same stupid, typically German way they simply constructed what they had destroyed before."
After the tiny school at Zollhaus-Blumberg, Peter found himself floundering at the huge Frankfurt Lessing Gymnasium: "I moved from being top of the class to nearly the bottom," he says. "It was about then that I got a little rebellious. If my father tried to make me work, I would reply with something like: 'I didn't start the war. I didn't kill the six million Jews. It's your problem'."
Peter managed to struggle through his Abitur, the A-level equivalent, and was accepted by Frankfurt University, where he took courses in comparative literature, medieval history and Sanskrit. After two years however, he suffered a mental collapse: "I began to disintegrate," he says. "In the holidays I would work in my father's factory. And I was tempted by this style of life - which was doing nothing, drinking beer and doing crazy things, and so I had a kind of mental breakdown and my mother kicked me out." He moved to Munich and enrolled at the university there, later pursuing a PhD thesis on the novels of ETA Hoffmann. But the attempt to transform himself into an academic proved a failure: "I hated everything I did," he says of his work, "I would always throw it away. I was too self-critical to do anything."
University life, however, did afford one life-changing consolation. Throughout his teenage years, Stein had displayed a strong interest in theatre and opera, "but no more than any German schoolboy," he insists. At Frankfurt, he had been fascinated by the world of student drama but, held back by shyness, lacked the courage to enter it: "I didn't dare. I would stutter and stall."
In Munich, he began as a stage hand, then took various roles in student productions. He met Moidele Bickel, a student designer who went on to create costumes for many of the major Schaubühne productions: "I thought he was the most intelligent guy I ever met," she recalls, "and he was a fantastic performer. It was not easy for him because he was shy, but he forced himself very much. As a result, he was very rough, quite aggressive and not very polite."
When a young student director named Dieter Giesing was taken on by the Munich Kammerspiele, he took Stein along as his uncredited (and, at first, unpaid) dramaturg. It soon became obvious that the sleeping partner was doing a great deal of the work and Stein was offered a contract as assistant director. In 1967, he was given the chance to direct in the Kammerspiele's smaller experimental space. He chose Saved, Edward Bond's exploration of cultural poverty. Stein cast the play with virtually unknown young actors, and, most daring of all, transposed the Brixton setting to a working-class district of Munich. When it premiered on April 15, 1967, the German magazine Theater Heute proclaimed that Saved signalled "a new generation in the German theatre".
Suddenly, Stein was the country's hottest young director. He took up an offer from the Bremer Theatre in Bremen to direct Schiller's Intrigue and Love. It was to prove an unusually fruitful project, not only in terms of its critical success, but also because it brought Stein in contact with many of the actors who would become the core of the Schaubühne: Jutta Lampe, Bruno Ganz and Edith Clever, later joined by Otto Sander and Werner Rehm. Lampe, who became his partner as well as his leading actress, recalls her first encounter with Stein's working methods: "It was the first time that I could be myself in rehearsal. And once this had been established, we could really open up the text. It may seem strange, but it was the first time I really understood what I was doing."
The collaboration proved so fruitful that Stein cast both Ganz and Clever in his next production at the Munich Kammerspiele, Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, in March 1968. By this time, however, the political situation was on the point of explosion. Street demonstrations erupted all over Germany and an increasingly politicised Stein chose for his next project the agitprop Vietnam-Discourse by Peter Weiss. The production incorporated elements of political cabaret and, most controversially, was followed nightly by a collection to supply weapons to the Vietcong: "You can imagine the reaction," says Stein. "This was the state theatre. There were only three performances before they closed it down."
After publicly calling for the resignation of the director of the Kammerspiele, Stein was dismissed from his post. Now a cause célèbre, he was snapped up by Bremen and by the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, where he directed Bond's Early Morning, Sean O'Casey's Cock-a-Doodle Dandy and The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley, all with the same group of actors. The most important production of this period was Goethe's Torquato Tasso, which tells the story of an artist in thrall to his 16th-century patrons. In the turbulent political context, this spurred the actors to think about their own creative and professional bonds: "We realised that Tasso himself had a lot in common with us," says Werner Rehm, "he was dependent on his patron, the duke, and we were dependent on our theatre manager. During the interval we talked to the audience, asking: 'Do you need art?' 'Are you dependent?'"
Stein's 1969 production of Vietnam - Discourse at the Schaubühne in Berlin proved even more fraught than the Munich experience. This time it was cancelled after just two performances, and the ensuing protests resulted in Stein being ejected from the theatre by police. But politicians in the Berlin city government were eager to attract a director of Stein's ability and also to appease the students, so a year later he was invited back to the Schaubühne not just to direct but to take over the building with a subsidy of DM1.8m. The new Schaubühne was to revolutionise the process of running a theatre. Ultra-democracy was the new guiding principle, with the technicians and cleaners having equal voting rights in creative decisions and questions of repertoire. "We simply wanted to create a new kind of theatre," says Lampe, "where the actors and all the artists would decide together what we were going to put on, instead of it being dictated by one person, just as it is once again."
Stein launched this new era with the Bertolt Brecht-Maxim Gorky play The Mother, a study of the Russian revolution. A "collective" of three, including Stein, attempted to implement the wishes of the group. The production triumphed largely due to the raw power of veteran actress Therese Giehse in the title role. Next, the group chose Vsevolod Vishnevsky's Optimistic Tragedy, which picked up where The Mother left off in 1917 and explored the civil war aftermath.
Even at this early stage, however, the Schaubühne democracy was beginning to disintegrate, as union rules and the antipathy of the technical staff threatened to bring decision-making to a stand-still. Ultimately, Stein and the actors were forced to reduce the input of those on short-term contracts, a move derided in the press as "the end of participation".
Stein, who now mocks the company's attempts to play The Mother to workers and apprentices, was becoming disillusioned with outwardly political theatre. "I don't believe that our audience should repeatedly have its revolutionary beard stroked," he said at the time. "I have no desire to peddle ideas. I refuse to put on plays which deal with the so-called problems of the working classes in our programme just to prove how leftish we are."
For the next production, he and the company returned to the traditional repertory and settled on Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Spread over two evenings, running over six hours and with a monumental set that incorporated a sphinx and a shipwreck, Stein's production split the eight stages of Peer's development between six actors. Political content wasn't entirely overlooked, however, with the character of the "strange passenger" diverging from Ibsen's written dialogue to ask questions such as: "What do you think of the controversy about the crisis of the individual? Have you ever tried to find out the facts about social conditions in Norway?"
The next choice seemed to diverge even further from the original Schaubühne principles: Kleist's Prince of Homburg, followed by Gorky's Summerfolk, a "Chekhov imitation" about a group of pre-revolutionary Russian holidaymakers. Following a field trip to Russia, Stein, dramaturg Botho Strauss and the company rewrote 40% of the text through improvisation in rehearsal. For the set, Stein transplanted an entire forest of birch trees on to the stage. When the production was premiered on December 22, 1974, the veteran critic Friedrich Luft wrote: "Something took place here, which in the theatre happens only half a dozen times in one's life."
Stein decided to take a break from the theatre, directing a film version of Summmerfolk and making an unsuccessful foray into opera with Wagner's Ring at the Paris Opera: "Theatre is a process of exploration during rehearsals," he complained. "The conception is formulated by the opening night, not [as in opera] a year before rehearsals begin."
Stein returned to the Schaubühne in 1976 to take on his first Shakespeare, As You Like It. The research process was extensive, with lectures on Elizabethan stagecraft and a company field trip to Warwickshire. Instead of the usual practice of including research in a lavish programme, the company transformed it into Shakespeare's Memory (1976), four hours of masked processions, Morris dancing, mummers plays and extracts from the plays.
Perhaps unnerved by the complexity of Shakespeare's text, Stein was unusually tentative. "We approached Shakespeare as we would a great continent," he said at the time, "and perhaps our navigational means were not quite adequate, maybe the boats were too small and the sails too big." As You Like It premiered in September 1977. The action began in an unprepossessingly cool, ice-blue chamber, with the actors performing in a restrained manner throughout the first two acts. Then in Act III, baffled audiences were led in single file through a tunnel filled with the sounds of the forest into the crepuscular labyrinth of Arden.
Stein's distance even from the German Shakespearean tradition, his willingness to illustrate the text with daring settings and thematic choreography, gave the plays a vitality "unknown in British productions," wrote the Guardian's Michael Billington of the later Julius Caesar, premiered in 1992, where Stein breathed riotous mob-rule life into the play with the help of 200 extras and a 45-metre stage. "In the Forum scene both Brutus and Mark Antony are confronted not by the usual apologetic handful but by a milling, angry, boiler-suited crowd that has to be forced to listen by guile and rhetoric. One of the production's most thrilling sights is seeing this throng of individuals turned into a collective force who weave and sway around the orators and then tear their temporary trestle stage to pieces."
The Berlin city government had by this time rewarded Stein's efforts with a brand-new DM100m building on Kurfürstendamm. It was here, in 1980, that he would stage his next major Schaubühne project: a seven-hour staging of the complete Oresteia and then in 1984 his landmark Three Sisters: "It is as though Stein has gone beyond the play to read the author's mind," enthused Ronald Holloway in the Financial Times. "This is, indeed, a milestone in contemporary West German theatre."
However, leading actors such as Bruno Ganz and Edith Clever had drifted away and the relationship between Stein and the owner of the Schaubühne, Jurgen Schithelm, had broken down: "Fifteen years with the same company, it was enough," Stein says now of his decision to quit in 1985. According to Jutta Lampe, the reasons were both personal and professional: "Until this point we had lived together and in 1984 we separated. It was a hard situation for us both and he decided to leave the theatre as well."
Stein's departure from the Schaubühne, however, didn't blunt his appetite for the theatre. In 1989 he continued his examination of Chekhov with a Cherry Orchard that featured a huge lopped-off tree-branch crashing through the set. Then in 1994, he restaged the Oresteia in Russian with actors from the Moscow Arts Theatre. During this period Brian McMaster, then artistic director of Welsh National Opera, persuaded him to have another - rather more successful - stab at opera with Verdi's Otello in 1986 followed by Falstaff (1988) and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1992).
Stein ended the century in typically quixotic style with a "grand project" that even staunch disciples felt might be beyond him: the complete Goethe's Faust. "I fought for seven years to do it," he says. "There was a kind of campaign against me in German theatre because of it and they didn't want to give me any money. So I had to found my own theatre for three years." Performed over 20 hours and costing over DM24m, Faust I & II was eventually performed at the Hanover Expo in 2000. The staging was perhaps the summation of Stein's attention to textual detail and expansive but always meticulously rendered visual style: a blood-red carpet to signify Helen's sacrifice; a split-personality devil and, in Stein's original conception, two actors playing Faust. Though the production was savaged by German critics for slavish adherence to the text, Michael Billington deemed the production "a brave, invigorating and highly theatrical experience".
Friends say that since settling at San Pancrazio in 1999 Stein seems more relaxed and content. As none of his relationships has produced children, a select group of favoured actors has become a surrogate family, and he takes great pleasure in renovating the buildings and tending the groves: "I am an agricultural man now," he jokes. "I have a house and I have debt. They tell me that real men have debt."
He is talking about setting up another new theatre, possibly with the help of a €5.5m grant from the German government: "I feel a duty to do it, because otherwise this money will not go to the theatre," he concludes. "Personally, I have absolutely no ambition yet to be fulfilled. I never had the feeling that I have a vocation, I never had the feeling that I am extremely talented. I know that I can do a couple of things better than others and I desperately look for challenges. If somebody says that something is not possible to do, I try it."
Peter Stein
Born: October 1,1937, Berlin
Education: Lessing Gymnasium, Frankfurt; University of Frankfurt; University of Berlin.
Relationships: Jutta Lampe, 1967-1984; Beatrice Stein, (Married 1985, divorced 1990); Maddalena Crippa, 1989-present (Married 1999).
Theatre productions include: 1967 Saved (Bond); Intrigue and Love (Schiller); '68 In the Jungle of Cities (Brecht); Vietnam-Discourse (Weiss); '69 Torquato Tasso (Goethe); Early Morning (Bond); '70 The Changeling (Middleton and Rowley); The Mother (Brecht-Gorky); '71 Peer Gynt (Ibsen); '72 Optimistic Tragedy (Vishnevsky); '74 Antikenprojekt I; Summerfolk (Gorky); '77 As You Like It ; '80 The Oresteia (Aeschylus); '84 Three Sisters (Chekhov); '92 Julius Caesar; '94 Antony & Cleopatra; Faust I & II, 2000; '03 The Seagull (Chekhov).
· The Seagull is at the King's Theatre, Leven Street, Edinburgh (0131 473 2000) from August 11-23.