Simon Stone on the lure of movie stars on stage, family tragedy, and staging a Chekhov play in Korean: ‘It’s one of the proudest moments of my career’ | Simon Stone

IIf Simon Stone had not intended to become a world-renowned theater and film director, he might have followed his parents into science, and might have stayed in Melbourne where he spent much of his childhood.

“Australia would have had everything I needed,” he says, although the passionate, youthful-looking, bearded writer-director gave the impression during our interview that Europe would still have retained its appeal.

Stone, 41, is speaking to me from Vienna, where he lived for eight years until moving to London three years ago, before opening his own production of his play Das Ferienhaus (The Holiday Home), a story of generational trauma.

Stone is on an impressive run: In September, he was in London debuting his third feature, a Netflix murder mystery called The Woman in Cabin 10, having recently adapted his own film adaptation of Ibsen’s novel The Lady from the Sea, starring Oscar winner Alicia Vikander. Filming is scheduled to begin next January for the movie Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman, which revolves around the late Scottish actor Ian Charleson’s battle with playing Hamlet on stage. In July, he will premiere an adaptation of Chekhov’s Ivanov starring Chris Pine.

Amid this star-studded schedule, he will return to Australia in February to direct his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – screened entirely in Korean with subtitles – at the Adelaide Festival.

Of his homeland, which he last visited earlier this year with his production of Kaija Saariahu’s Opera Innocence, Stone says: “Australia is so well equipped recreationally that spending time in a dark theater or cinema [there] It is somewhat of an afterthought.

Europe has proven simpler. “Australians are bending over backwards to get along with each other; [but] “Theater is an area of ​​social confrontation,” says Stone. “The attitude of Australians immersed in theatre, opera and film – for which I blame no one – is not enough for me. I like to serve the communities that are most hungry for my goods: the culture obsessives.”

Stone’s life could have taken a very different path. At the age of 12, he wanted to become a marine biologist, influenced in part by his late father, Stuart, who was a biochemist and molecular biologist, and his mother, Eleanor Mackey, a veterinarian turned teacher.

In the same year, 1996, Stone witnessed the death of his father at the age of 45, following a heart attack while swimming. The loss sparked Stone’s great hunger for art, film, and literature, and through it he learned that all cultures fear death and want to leave something behind. It may also have fueled his apparent ambition to create and direct a huge body of work as soon as possible, knowing that life is finite.

After our interview, I sent him a dedication to his father published a year after his death by a scientific colleague: “His approach to science was one of the reasons for Stuart’s success. Alternative methods of research can be compared to those of artists, where some fill their paintings with broad strokes and add detail later, others start with fine detail in one corner and then work from there to cover the painting. The latter was Stuart’s style.”

“Awesome,” Stone answers. “I think I’ll definitely be the last one too! Sometimes I annoy my colleagues when they ask me what will happen in another part of the play or film, and I say: ‘I have no idea yet!’ Let’s find out first!”

Stone was born in Basel, Switzerland, where his father worked, and grew up bilingual in German and English and spent part of his youth in Cambridge. He always writes his plays in English, usually radically reworking classical texts.

As a director, he gained a reputation for confining actors in transparent boxes on stage, as in his radical reworking of Ibsen’s cruel tragedy The Wild Ducks, in which the actors performed behind glass walls, with radio microphones. It premiered at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater in 2011, and became his international calling card, showing in Norway, Austria and London, and forming the basis for his feature directorial debut, The Daughter, in 2015.

The following year, he used a glass case in his adaptation of Yerma Lorca at the Young Vic Theatre, winning Olivier Awards for Best Revival and Best Actress for Billie Piper. Most recently, Innocence appeared in a two-story rotating transparent box designed by regular collaborator Chloe Lamford, with windows in several rooms providing a voyeuristic view of the school shooting and concurrent events.

I suggest to Stone that he, like a scientist, examines human behavior and forensic psychology in a petri dish. “I think this is a legitimate analysis,” he says, before explaining his more practical reasoning – which is to tame actors’ showmanship instincts: “There is an inherent obsession with realism on stage.” [but] “I’m literally building the fourth wall instead of taking it down.”

“When an actor walks on stage and looks at the audience when there’s not a glass wall there, it’s as if the audience is being looked at,” explains Stone, himself an actor on stage and screen in his teens and twenties. “It always seems like the actor wants to be seen…but when you put a glass wall there, the actor doesn’t see the audience, they see a reflection of the house they’re in. So the actor is less arrogant, because they’re not really aware of the audience. And that really helps with comedy, too, because actors say, ‘No “I can tell if the audience is laughing or not,” and I say, “That’s great, because you keep telling your story.”

Stone’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, which premiered in Seoul in 2024, is set inside a house with wall-to-ceiling windows (designed by architect Saul Kim) through which we see a contemporary eating and drinking family who – like Chekhov’s aristocratic Russian family a century earlier – face brutal societal changes.

Jeon Do Yeon, winner of the Best Actress Award at Cannes for “Secret Sunshine,” and Park Hae Soo, nominated for an Emmy Award for “Squid Game,” play the lead roles. “I took this approach [to the theatre company]“, says Stone, who describes himself as “obsessed with Korean culture” and “its embrace of privacy, weirdness, and openness that suddenly turns introverted.”

“They were like, ‘Really? Do you want to come to Korea and get paid much less for presenting here? “And I was like, ‘Yes please,'” he says. “My instincts paid off. “It is one of the proudest moments of my career.”

At his home in London, German is the main language Stone speaks with his wife of eight years, Austrian dramatic actress Stephanie Hackl, while their three-year-old daughter is “growing up bilingual”.

Although Stone does not know Korean grammar, he can now easily recognize words, and because he wrote the English text for The Cherry Orchard (translated by Daneby Yi), he knows where emphasis should fall in sentences. “No matter what language you speak, the name is important to you,” he says.

But what about sensitivities: Would he think twice before writing a joke that might be appreciated in one culture but might not go down in another, especially one that uses another language?

“Yes, but interestingly, a lot of my English-language gags have been in Korean. There’s something particularly satisfying when I hear a thousand people in Seoul laugh at a joke I wrote in English in a kitchen in Vienna,” he says.