Peter Lichtenfels was born in Germany in 1949. His family emigrated to Canada in the mid-1950s where he completed his education, seeing his first ever play while at university in Montreal. Within a year he had become a theatre director and from that moment on dedicated his life to theatre and performance of all kinds.
Peter relocated to the UK in the early 1970s where he contributed substantially to the UK theatre ecology, including during his tenures as Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, before moving on to the United States and other international work.
Defying easy categorization, Peter’s work has focused on exploring the links between making and writing, between process and product, during a journey that took him from directing into producing, to writing about performance and to dramaturgy and editing (both plays and books) in ways that drew on his own experience but also that of the artists that he engaged in dialogue
A generous and honest collaborator, this collection of Peter’s essays sits side by side with reflections and tributes by a selection of Peter’s co-labourers, some of whom have been his students and all of whom he would consider his teachers. They offer a series of approaches to the ongoing change that his kind of directing attempts to generate and a series of lenses onto what the essays attempt
His own writing reveals an approach to directing embedded in international engagement. He wrote essays on directors he admired, from Peter Sellars to Tadeusz Kantor. Other essays feature his fascination with craft, technique and preparation and the ways in which he engaged with the craft of directing.
This volume is for any collaborator in theatre work, the actor, the director, the theatre maker and the audience member or critic.
