Peter Kleinschmidt

Peter Kleinschmidt (1940-2020) is an influential 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 work as a dramaturg at theatres in 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.

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, his first production was Ionesco's Rhinoceros with the students of UCT at the Little Theatre in 1963.

He often returned to South Africa on occasion to direct work for various companies, including the Performing Arts Councils, inter alia to direct The Birds(1965), Ubu Roi (1967), Vrede (1983), Kermis op Koekenmoer (1983), .

With PEMADS Exit the King.

[FdV, TH]