«StWe are at nine, After Titus Andronicus, Uncle Vanya, penthesesilea, Medea, Schoenberg Kabarett, Richard II, Italy My Italy, Der Park». Madeleine Crippa she makes an effort to remember to list the shows she has performed since 1989 under the direction of her husband Peter Stein. And one escapes her. “There are also The demonshe intervenes, a giant of the European scene, in his impeccable and rich Italian. Today we are at 10, therefore, with Birthday by Harold Pinter, on tour until 5 March: the story of a couple and their renter, mentally unstable, who live a boring and repetitive daily life until the arrival of two indecipherable characters.
Maddalena Crippa and Peter Stein (photo Daniela Zedda).
Crazy, comical and shocking
Why choose a 1957 Pinter?
Peter It’s very crazy, very comical and, at times, very shocking. The structure is very modern and I am interested in the texts themselves, without pursuing current events with the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis or the reawakening of fascism in Europe.
He must have enjoyed giving his wife the part of Meg, a disheveled housewife who looks nothing like her.
P. It depends on your point of view. From one that comes from Brianza you can expect just about everything (they both laugh).
Madeleine I enjoy it a lot, I must admit.
P. Her role seems uninteresting, but it is fundamental: Meg is the dispenser, the one in charge of the comedy, being totally stupid.
m. Naive…
“Let’s make it weird, let’s make it bad”
How did Maddalena work to embody someone like this?
m. I clung to my roots, to the accent, to that certain je ne sais quoi “terragno” of those who come from my area. I “use” myself, but in the service of the character. Virtuosity for its own sake doesn’t make sense to me, it makes senseensembles. Theater is not a monologue, it is a game of human relationships: we are social beings and it serves us as a mirror, as a reflection. No one commits himself to acting anymore with Peter’s precision, respect for words and fidelity in translation. A wonderful knowledge has been lost in pursuit of the effect, of “let’s do it strange” which sometimes becomes “let’s do it badly”.
P. You can understand a sentence literally without understanding its true meaning. What do you want to communicate to me with: “The weather is beautiful”? “I say this because it has been a sad week…”. Ah then you have to color the sentence with this experience: it’s the famous subtext, which comes from the heart, from feelings, not from the brain.
What is it like collaborating with life partner?
m. More difficult than with the others: sensitivity is more discovered. And he doesn’t treat me better, on the contrary. If you are not his woman, there is a distance that preserves you.
P. Of course, we share the bathroom! (smiles) It’s not easy with Maddalena: she gets angry quickly. Thanks to her – in ’89, when we were preparing Titus Andronicus – I discovered the expression “straw tail”. I asked a co-worker: why does that one always react like a fury? I am paid to criticize the actors… “You have a straw tail”. And what is it? After 34 years, I still don’t quite get it.
m. It means it catches fire quickly. Or not?
Maddalena Crippa and Peter Stein, the first meeting
According to the Accademia della Crusca, it indicates those who do not have a clear conscience and are suspicious for fear of being discovered.
m. No, this not. However: in Peter’s etymology there is “stone” (makes the gesture of someone who is tough). The Kraut and the Alpine Brianza, a nice match.
When the meeting?
m. In Palermo, in 1987, in front of Santa Maria della Catena. He held a seminar and my boyfriend (we were already aware that the story would not last) was his right arm. He introduced him to me and, after five minutes, I understood: “He’s my man!”. But it was like dreaming of the Pope.
What was the first thing you thought of her, Peter?
P. Impressive. I saw against the light, a girl (I was 20 years older) with cycling-style shorts. It was a time when I was done with women. I had a more than unhappy marriage and I had decided: Enough!
m. In fact it made me suffer. For two years I went to see him in Berlin with the excuse that there was the project of Titus Andronicus: he invited me to breakfast at home, to visit museums…
P. Once, at an exhibition, he reached into my pocket (they both laugh at the memory). How does she come up with putting her hand in my pocket?!?
m. I couldn’t find grips. He’s not a jackass and I’m not Jack the Conqueror in my own right: I have a rather masculine attitude. A terrible frustration.
The Titus Andronicus finally arrived on stage, in Genoa.
m. We got together during the set up. He had broken his leg, falling over to look cool, and I was driving him around.
From the personal album of Maddalena Crippa and Peter Stein, the wedding day.
“Our good retreat”
You have to manage long separations. A good thing, a bad thing?
P. For me it’s absolutely positive, it’s our job. If I’m – say – in England for a staging, nothing else exists and so time passes quickly. And coming together is extraordinary.
m. Then we have this place in Umbria, San Pancrazio, an abandoned medieval village that we have restored and that allows us something that is now denied: the community. We tried there a month and a half as well Birthdayliving with the cast at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
P. The only way to escape from this theatrical concentration camp is a small village bar three kilometers away.
Who had the intuition?
m. Him, of course! (shrugs). I organize and I’m there, but this great stuff (like the vision that has guided him in every theater collective he’s created) is his. I would never have dared: seven houses, 70 hectares around, a rehearsal room set into the hill…
I lived on art, I lived on love… An all-encompassing relationship, an idyll.
m. But what an idyll! You think? (winks)
P. Very often I thought it was total idiocy, too vast. Eventually, however, I understood why I persevered: quite simply, I want to die there. The connection with nature is unique: all around, only fields and woods.
Maddalena Crippa and Peter Stein in 1989, during the preparation of “Titus Andronicus” (photo Tommaso Le Pera).
“We didn’t have to eat”
Did you grow up in the green? Did she miss you?
P. No, I was born in Berlin. My father was an industrialist, he led with his collaborator colleagues that German war industry that ruined Europe. After the Second World War – I was seven years old – we moved to the border with Switzerland: we had nothing to eat, our possessions had disappeared. Living three years without having anything, only with the clothes we wore, was a very important thing for my training. From 1949, with the foundation of the Federal Republic, things started again. My father and the others went back to the same positions and did the rebuilding: the same str… benefited from the rebuilding!
No artists in the family?
P. My mother was a sculptor, a pity that – when she got married – she stopped. As a bourgeois scion I tried to play the violin: very bad. To paint: a total disaster. I wrote poems which, when they had just been composed, seemed stupendous in the evening and horrible in the morning. I soon realized that I had no predisposition, and in any case I didn’t intend to become like my father, who produced technologies that were harmful to the human race and, moreover, difficult to dispose of. I wanted to deal with what people keep with all their might and keep in museums. Lacking talent, I fell back on art history and literature at university. I studied for ten years, I started late with the theater and this is perhaps the difference with most directors: what do they know about masterpieces? What “internal picture gallery” do they have? What “music room”, what “internal library” to resort to?
Maddalena Crippa and Peter Stein, from their private album.
“I burst into tears”
How did it start in your case, Maddalena?
m. In middle school I took part in an oratorio show which my father directed (he has always dealt with it at an amateur level). I took a duck and decided: I’ll be an actress! At 12 I was sure.
Excuse me, wouldn’t it have been more natural to close it there?
P. What is “duck”?
m. A mistake in diction… No, no trauma: when the curtain closed and I burst into tears, I realized that I had never felt such a strong emotion! But I was too young for an acting school, and so I was “parked” at the artistic high school of Monza, that of the Preziosine (the congregation of the nuns of the Most Precious Blood, ed). When, in 1973, it came out on the Courier that Giorgio Strehler was looking for an interpreter for Anja di The Cherry Orchard, I showed up for the audition and it went very well, but he chose Monica Guerritore. However, out of 400 aspirants, I had struck the Master: he had called me and asked for me. The following year, the phone rang: it was the Piccolo, Strehler was looking for me for Lucietta by The campiello. 450 replies! Starting like this is – I believe – a sign of seriousness, depth, truth.
Maddalena Crippa in a moment of “Titus Andronicus” (photo Tommaso Le Pera).
Italy-Germany
Is there a favorite among your collaborations?
P. For me the Medea of Euripides, in Syracuse. Speaking without a microphone to thousands of spectators, the scenic device to create a sun six meters by six, at a height of 36 meters…
m. Medeayes, I agree: for the completeness of the whole.
How did the Italian and German world harmonize?
P. I started coming here in ’55 for my studies…
m. Before I was born.
P. …since then I’ve spent at least one month a year in your country, but there’s no easy recipe for a romantic relationship. As in the kitchen: put a little salt, a little pepper, but it can happen that you ruin the food (laughs). The exceptionality, in our case, is above all the duration, considering that we start from two universes and two very dissimilar personalities, with twenty years of difference. We had no children.
m. They did not come (spreads his arms).
P. San Pancrazio was our child.
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