If Simon Stone 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.
“Australia would have had everything I needed,” he says – although, during our interview, the youthful-looking, bearded, passionate writer and director gives the impression Europe would have still held its allure.
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 (The Holiday Home), a story of generational trauma.
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, having recently staged his adaptation of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, 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’s battle with playing Hamlet on stage. In July, he’ll premiere an adaptation of Chekhov’s Ivanov starring Chris Pine.
Amid this starry schedule, he’ll return to Australia in February to direct his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – staged entirely in Korean, with subtitles – at the Adelaide festival.
Of his homeland, which he last visited last year with his production of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence, Stone muses, “Australia is so recreationally well-appointed that spending time in a dark theatre or cinema [there] is somewhat of an afterthought.”
Europe has proved more simpatico. “Australians bend over backwards to get along with each other, [but] theatre is a zone of social confrontation,” says Stone. “The dip-in, dip-out attitude of Aussies to theatre, opera and film – which I very much don’t blame anyone for – isn’t enough for me. I like to serve the communities that are hungriest for my wares: culture obsessives.”
Stone’s 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.
The same year, 1996, Stone witnessed the death of his father at age 45, from a heart attack while swimming. The loss spurred Stone’s 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.
After our interview, I send him a dedication to his father published the year after his death by a science colleague: “A reason for Stuart’s 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’s style.”
“Wow,” Stone replies. “I think I would definitely also be the latter! I infuriate my collaborators sometimes when they ask me what’s going to happen in another part of the play or film, and I say, ‘I have no idea yet! Let’s figure this out first!’”
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.
As a director, he’s developed a reputation for caging actors in transparent boxes on stage, as in his radical reworking of Ibsen’s cruel tragedy The Wild Duck, where the actors performed behind glass walls, with radio microphones. Premiering at Sydney’s Belvoir St theatre in 2011, it became his international calling card, staged in Norway, Austria and London, and forming the basis for his 2015 feature directorial debut, The Daughter.
The following year, he used a glass case in his adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma 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.
I suggest to Stone that, like a scientist, he is forensically examining human behaviour and psychology in a petri dish. “I think that’s a legitimate analysis,” he says before explaining his more practical rationale – taming actors’ exhibitionist instincts: “There’s an inherent obsession with realism on stage [but] I’m literally building the fourth wall instead of removing it.”
Stone, himself an actor on stage and screen in his teens and 20s, explains: “When an actor walks down stage and looks at the audience when there’s no glass wall there, it looks like the audience is being looked at. It always looks like the actor wants to be seen … But when you put a glass wall there, the actor doesn’t see the audience, but a reflection of the house they’re in. So the actor is being less vain, because they’re not really aware of the audience. It really helps with comedy, too, because the actors say: ‘I couldn’t tell if the audience was laughing or not’. I go, ‘That’s great, because you just keep telling your story.’”
Stone’s 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 – like Chekhov’s aristocrat Russian family of a century earlier – contending with brutal societal changes.
Cannes best actress winner Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine) and Emmy-nominated Park Hae-soo (Squid Game) take the main roles. “I made the approach [to the theatre company],” says Stone, who describes himself as “obsessed with Korean culture” and its “embrace of peculiarity and weirdness and extroversion suddenly flipping to introversion”.
“They were like, ‘Really? You want to come to Korea and get paid a lot less to do a show here?’ and I was like, ‘Yes please’,” he says. “My instincts paid off. It’s one of the proudest moments in my career.”
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 “very much growing up bilingual”.
Although Stone doesn’t 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. “No matter what language you’re speaking, the noun is important to you,” he says.
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?
“Yes,” he says, “but 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.”
The Cherry Orchard runs 27 February – 1 March at the Festival Theatre as part of the Adelaide festival
