Peter Kleinschmidt

Peter Kleinschmidt (1940-2020) is an influential German director.

Biography

Born Peter Kleinschmidt in München, Germany, on 23 February, 1940 and grew up om Frankfurt am Main. He received training in piano and composition and was Scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation, completing a dissertation on East-Asian arts.

After a short stint in South Africa in 1962-3, when he was brought to South Africa by Donald Inskip to work with the Department of Speech and Drama at the University of Cape Town, he returned to Germany to become a dramaturg at theatres in Kiel, Frankfurt am Main, Köln and Stuttgart from 1964 onwards.

As director he staged about 30 plays across the world, incluuding places such as Amsterdam, Antwerp, Cape Town, Mexiko City, Rostock, Windhoek (Namibia), and so on. etc.

He also did more than two dozen translations from the works of Aristophanes and the English canon of light theatre, to the political works of Athol Fugard and two plays by Pieter Fourie (Faan se Trein and Faan se Stasie), which he also adapted as a single drama simply entitled Faan. (There is no indication that this was ever performed.)

In 1983 he became the Direktor of the Otto-Falckenberg-Schule, which was attached to the Münchner Kammerspielen, remaining in this position till 1986.

In 1984 Kleinschmidt and his wife moved to a former farmhouse in Loipfing, a district of the Upper Bavarian municipality of Isen, where they lived with the married couple Claus-Paul und Petra Haller and would organize and present more than 50 perfoirmances, concerts, lectures, theatre productions and events in the Rittersaal (Knights' Hall) in Loipfing, as well as occasional productions in other venues.

He passed away on 17 March, 2020.

Productions in South Africa

When he came to Cape Town in 1962, at the invitation of Donald Inskip, his first production was Ionesco's Rhinoceros with the students of UCT at the Little Theatre in 1963. He would return to South Africa and Namibia frequently over the course of the next few decades to direct work for various companies, including the Performing Arts Councils. Among the productions were The Birds(1965), Ubu Roi (1967), Kom Spook By My (1968), August August, August (1970), Die Stoele (1970), Exit the King (PEMADS, 1971-2), Die Weerstaanbare Opkoms van Arturo Ui (1973), Die Wind in die Takke van Sassafras (1974), Die Paddas (1977), Vrede (1983), Kermis op Koekenmoer (1983), The Double Bass (1988) and Tonight Neither Hamlet (1998), .