Anthony Vivis
Translator
Anthony Vivis (1943-2013) was a talented writer and translator, teacher and mentor, broadcaster and an all-round man of the theatre. He was particularly concerned with postwar German and Austrian authors and playwrights. His pioneering translations and stage productions of directors and writers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Sperr and Botho Strauss, and of poems by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele and the Nobel prizewinning novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek brought a new generation of writers to the attention of a largely Anglophone audience. His best-known titles as translator include Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (starring Delphine Seyrig at the New End, Hampstead, in 1976), Manfred Karge’s The Conquest of the South Pole (with Alan Cumming at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 1988), Botho Strauss’s The Park, a brilliant reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a concrete dystopia (directed by Steven Pimlott at the Sheffield Crucible in 1988) and Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves, which featured Ken Stott and Eileen Nicholas at the Traverse in 1985 and Simon Callow and Ann Mitchell at the Southwark Playhouse (transferring to the West End) in 2003.
