In an age when mainland European directors are often judged by the extravagance of their concepts, Luc Bondy, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was famed for his subtlety and finesse. Although his radical production of Tosca was roundly booed at its premiere at the New York Met in 2009, he was neither a self-promoting showman nor an exponent of what Germans call Regietheater, or director’s theatre.
From what we saw of his theatre and opera productions at the Edinburgh festival, and at the Young Vic and the Royal Opera House in London, he viewed his prime task as that of elucidating a work’s meaning. He also had a light touch and was as much at home in the work of Arthur Schnitzler and Sacha Guitry as in that of Beckett and Pinter.
Bondy was born in Zurich into a richly cultured Jewish family. His grandfather, Fritz, ran the German theatre in Prague, his mother, Lillian (nee Blumenstein), had aspired to be a dancer and his father, François, edited a literary journal. But the young Bondy’s theatrical ambitions were fired by studying mime in Paris in 1966 with Jacques Lecoq, something that bore fruit in his later work, which was often full of an exuberant physicality.
As a director, he began to make his mark in the German theatre of the 1970s. His debut came in Göttingen in 1971 with a production of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s The Fool and the Nun, which was quickly followed by admired versions of Edward Bond’s The Sea, in Munich, Ödön von Horváth’s Faith, Hope, and Charity, in Hamburg, and Alfred de Musset’s No Trifling With Love, at the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin.
In 1985 Bondy took over the directorship of the prestigious Schaubühne. Like its founder, Peter Stein, he brought to the job a respect for dramatists, a multilingual European sensibility and a fondness for the work of the experimental German playwright Botho Strauss.
In 1986, Bondy also started directing opera with a production of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte in Brussels. His 1992 production of Strauss’s Salome, starring Catherine Malfitano, marked his debut at Covent Garden.
But it was only in the mid-1990s, thanks to the enthusiastic championship of Brian McMaster at the Edinburgh festival, that his name began to be widely known in Britain.
The first Bondy production to hit Edinburgh was of Peter Handke’s play without dialogue, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, in 1994. This was an extraordinary affair in which 33 actors brought to life more than 400 characters and, if the stage teemed with the exuberant quirkiness of everyday life, it owed much to Bondy’s apprenticeship with Lecoq. A year later his capacity for invention was confirmed by a dazzling double-bill of Guitry’s The Illusionist and Let’s Dream. This was boulevard comedy staged with real wit and flair and including a superb evocation of the glamorous fakery of a traditional Paris music hall.
In London, the Young Vic became Bondy’s spiritual home. In 2004 he staged Martin Crimp’s update of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis called Cruel and Tender. Although Bondy was not primarily a political director, he grasped the urgency of Crimp’s text, which argued that global terrorism is a hydra-headed monster that cannot be defeated by conventional means.
Equally impressive was Bondy’s staging in 2010 of David Harrower’s Sweet Nothings, based on Schnitzler’s Liebelei. This was an exquisite production in which Bondy caught perfectly the sense that fin de siècle Vienna was a city of reckless youthful hedonism haunted by the shadow of death.
The Young Vic’s artistic director, David Lan, said: “The strongest memory I have of Luc over many years of working together is of his loud, impish laughter. He was a supreme artist: highly disciplined with a baroque imagination, a deep engagement with European enlightenment philosophers, especially Spinoza, and a powerful sense of his own Jewish background. But he was also a great teller of jokes and funny stories – a terrific host either at his flat round the corner from the Paris Odéon or at his favourite Chinese restaurant in Soho.”
Bondy was, above all, a versatile director as well as a multifaceted man. His 1996 production of Verdi’s Don Carlos at Covent Garden was grand opera at its best: apart from Bernard Haitink’s conducting and the sumptuous singing from a cast that included Karita Mattila, I have never forgotten the way that Bondy brought out the emotional intensity of the relationship between Roberto Alagna’s Don Carlos and Thomas Hampson’s Marquis of Posa.
But Bondy did an equally fine job on Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming (Le Retour) at the Odéon, when he took up the directorship of the theatre in 2012. Without destroying the fabric of Pinter’s play, Bondy showed that it was about a bunch of lonely men, dominated by Bruno Ganz’s Max, occupying a house of dreams suddenly invaded by Emmanuelle Seigner’s startlingly alluring Ruth. Without any hint of self-aggrandisement, Bondy was simply a great European director.
He is survived by his wife, the actor, writer and director Marie-Louise Bischofberger, and their twins, Eloïse and Emmanuel.
• Luc Bondy, theatre and opera director, born 17 July 1948; died 28 November 2015
• This article was corrected on 7 December 2015. The conductor of Don Carlos at Covent Garden was Bernard Haitink rather than Antonio Pappano.
