{"id":267686,"date":"2026-01-05T02:36:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T02:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/267686\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T02:36:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T02:36:07","slug":"simon-stone-on-luring-film-stars-on-stage-family-tragedy-and-staging-chekhov-in-korean-its-one-of-the-proudest-moments-in-my-career-simon-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/267686\/","title":{"rendered":"Simon Stone on luring film stars on stage, family tragedy and staging Chekhov in Korean: \u2018It\u2019s one of the proudest moments in my career\u2019 | Simon Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Simon Stone<\/a> had not set out to become a theatre- and film-maker of international renown, he might have instead followed his parents into science, perhaps even remaining in Melbourne where he spent most of his childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cAustralia would have had everything I needed,\u201d he says \u2013 although, during our interview, the youthful-looking, bearded, passionate writer and director gives the impression Europe would have still held its allure.<\/p>\n

Stone, 41, is speaking to me from Vienna, where he was based for eight years until moving to London three years ago, before the opening of his own production of his play Das Ferienhaus<\/a> (The Holiday Home), a story of generational trauma.<\/p>\n

Stone is having a remarkable run: in September, he was in London premiering his third feature, the Netflix murder mystery The Woman in Cabin 10<\/a>, having recently staged his adaptation of Ibsen\u2019s The Lady from the Sea<\/a>, starring Oscar winner Alicia Vikander. In January, he will start shooting Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman, about the late Scottish actor Ian Charleson\u2019s battle with playing Hamlet on stage. In July, he\u2019ll premiere an adaptation of Chekhov\u2019s Ivanov starring Chris Pine.<\/p>\n

Amid this starry schedule, he\u2019ll return to Australia in February to direct his adaptation of Chekhov\u2019s The Cherry Orchard<\/a> \u2013 staged entirely in Korean, with subtitles \u2013 at the Adelaide festival.<\/p>\n

Stone, who describes himself as \u2018obsessed with Korean culture\u2019, will stage his adaptation of Chekhov\u2019s The Cherry Orchard entirely in Korean. Photograph: LG Arts Center<\/p>\n

Of his homeland, which he last visited last year with his production of Kaija Saariaho\u2019s opera Innocence<\/a>, Stone muses, \u201cAustralia is so recreationally well-appointed that spending time in a dark theatre or cinema [there] is somewhat of an afterthought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Europe has proved more simpatico. \u201cAustralians bend over backwards to get along with each other, [but] theatre is a zone of social confrontation,\u201d says Stone. \u201cThe dip-in, dip-out attitude of Aussies to theatre, opera and film \u2013 which I very much don\u2019t blame anyone for \u2013 isn\u2019t enough for me. I like to serve the communities that are hungriest for my wares: culture obsessives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stone\u2019s production of Kaija Saariaho\u2019s opera Innocence premiered at the prestigious Festival D\u2019Aix-en-Provence in 2021 and came to Adelaide festival in 2025. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/Jean-Louis Fernandez<\/p>\n

Stone\u2019s life could have taken a very different path. At age 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 Mackie, a veterinary scientist turned teacher.<\/p>\n

The same year, 1996, Stone witnessed the death of his father at age 45, from a heart attack while swimming. The loss spurred Stone\u2019s great hunger for art, film and literature, through which he learned all cultures fear death and wish to leave something behind. It perhaps also fuelled his evident ambition to create and direct a huge body of work as early as possible, knowing life is finite.<\/p>\n

After our interview, I send him a dedication to his father published the year after his death by a science colleague: \u201cA reason for Stuart\u2019s success was his approach to science. The alternative styles of research can be compared to that of artists, some fill their canvas with broad strokes and later add detail, others start with fine detail in one corner and work out from that to cover the canvas. The latter was Stuart\u2019s style.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWow,\u201d Stone replies. \u201cI think I would definitely also be the latter! I infuriate my collaborators sometimes when they ask me what\u2019s going to happen in another part of the play or film, and I say, \u2018I have no idea yet! Let\u2019s figure this out first!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander and Brendan Cowell in The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge theatre, London. Photograph: Johan Persson<\/p>\n

Born in Basel, Switzerland, where his father had been posted, Stone 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 classic texts.<\/p>\n

As a director, he\u2019s developed a reputation for caging actors in transparent boxes on stage, as in his radical reworking of Ibsen\u2019s cruel tragedy The Wild Duck<\/a>, where the actors performed behind glass walls, with radio microphones. Premiering at Sydney\u2019s Belvoir St theatre in 2011, it became his international calling card, staged in Norway, Austria and London<\/a>, and forming the basis for his 2015 feature directorial debut, The Daughter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The following year, he used a glass case in his adaptation of Lorca\u2019s Yerma<\/a> at the Young Vic theatre, winning Olivier awards for best revival and best actress for Billie Piper. More recently, Innocence featured a two-storey revolving transparent box designed by regular collaborator Chloe Lamford, with windows into several rooms providing a voyeuristic view into a school shooting and simultaneous events.<\/p>\n

I suggest to Stone that, like a scientist, he is forensically examining human behaviour and psychology in a petri dish. \u201cI think that\u2019s a legitimate analysis,\u201d he says before explaining his more practical rationale \u2013 taming actors\u2019 exhibitionist instincts: \u201cThere\u2019s an inherent obsession with realism on stage [but] I\u2019m literally building the fourth wall instead of removing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stone, himself an actor on stage and screen in his teens and 20s, explains: \u201cWhen an actor walks down stage and looks at the audience when there\u2019s no glass wall there, it looks like the audience is being looked at. It always looks like the actor wants to be seen \u2026 But when you put a glass wall there, the actor doesn\u2019t see the audience, but a reflection of the house they\u2019re in. So the actor is being less vain, because they\u2019re not really aware of the audience. It really helps with comedy, too, because the actors say: \u2018I couldn\u2019t tell if the audience was laughing or not\u2019. I go, \u2018That\u2019s great, because you just keep telling your story.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Stone\u2019s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, which premiered in Seoul in 2024, takes place inside a house with wall-to-ceiling windows (designed by architect Saul Kim) through which we see a contemporary family eating and drinking and \u2013 like Chekhov\u2019s aristocrat Russian family of a century earlier \u2013 contending with brutal societal changes.<\/p>\n

Staging The Cherry Orchard in Korean is \u2018one of the proudest moments in my career\u2019, says Stone. Photograph: LG Arts Center<\/p>\n

Cannes best actress winner Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine) and Emmy-nominated Park Hae-soo (Squid Game) take the main roles. \u201cI made the approach [to the theatre company],\u201d says Stone, who describes himself as \u201cobsessed with Korean culture\u201d and its \u201cembrace of peculiarity and weirdness and extroversion suddenly flipping to introversion\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were like, \u2018Really? You want to come to Korea and get paid a lot less to do a show here?\u2019 and I was like, \u2018Yes please\u2019,\u201d he says. \u201cMy instincts paid off. It\u2019s one of the proudest moments in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n

At home in London, German is the main language Stone speaks with his wife of eight years, the Austrian dramaturg Stefanie Hackl, while their three-year-old daughter is \u201cvery much growing up bilingual\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although Stone doesn\u2019t know Korean grammar, he can now recognise words easily, and because he wrote the English-language script for The Cherry Orchard (translated by Danybi Yi), he knows where emphases in sentences should fall. \u201cNo matter what language you\u2019re speaking, the noun is important to you,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Yet what of sensibilities: would he think twice about writing a joke that would be appreciated in one culture that might not fly in another, particularly one that uses another tongue?<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d he says, \u201cbut interestingly a lot of my gags in English worked in Korean. There is something particularly satisfying about hearing 1,000 people in Seoul laugh at a joke you wrote in English in a kitchen in Vienna.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Simon Stone had not set out to become a theatre- and film-maker of international renown, he might…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[434,18,117,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-267686","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}