Peter Zadek

Indeed, Genet was so outraged by Zadek's world première of The Balcony at the Arts in 1957 that he apparently bought a gun with the intention of shooting its director.

Zadek was renowned for productions of Shakespeare's plays and for sparking a greater interest in English drama among German audiences.

14 stagings in three years and four in the following six months: „Zadek was in a rush of making“ (im Rausch des Machens), and his „Theatermut“ (theater-courage) rejected the literary Shakespeare and took his absurdly grotesque side out.

[7] So Zadek's acclaimed staging of Der Kaufmann von Venedig (The Merchant of Venice) at Burgtheater in 1988 f. e. moved the story from the bankrupt businessman and the deadly pledge for the saving credit wisely and harmoniously into the modern every daylife.

Frey was the first American to hold any position at the Berliner Ensemble, as well as being the theatre's first non-German Music Director; his historic predecessors include the composers Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau —all of them worked under Brecht.

The prize organization stated:In giving the award to Peter Zadek, we wanted to salute the work of an artist who, in a long career beginning in England and continuing for more than forty years in Germany, has reinvented the art of the theatre director by working at the same time both directly on the text with his chosen actors, and in pursuit of a ‘conceptual’ method of directing.

Thus he has found, and continues to find, his personal vision and create with it a lively impact in each production, while retaining the principles of his ‘guiding spirits’, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov.

I recall a modern-dress Merchant of Venice in which Gert Voss's assimilated Shylock, even after his humiliation in the trial scene, coolly strolled off stage as if preparing to phone his broker.

In 2004, Zadek also brought us a brilliantly witty, ironic Peer Gynt: one that suggested Ibsen anticipated Strindbergian dream-drama, Brechtian expressionism, the madhouse world of the Marat/Sade and even modern physical theatre.

"[23]In 1999 in Vienna, when he directed Hamlet with a woman in the title role, the Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung criticized him having too much of a "children belief in justice"[24] (Kinderglaube an Gerechtigkeit).