Piscator, Erwin Friedrich Maximilian

Piscator, Erwin Friedrich Maximilian (1893-1966), German Marxist theatre director. Piscator was born in Ulm on December 17, 1893. In 1919, after training as an actor and director, he established the Tribune company to perform plays influenced both by Expressionism and by the politically committed work of the Proletarisches Theater (Proletarian Theatre) group, which he took over from its founder, Karlheinz Martin, in 1920. At various Berlin theatres, but chiefly at the Volksbühne (1924-1927) and then at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz (1927-1928), Piscator and his associates, who included the playwright Bertolt Brecht, pioneered the use of simultaneous scenes and the insertion of slides and film into plays, culminating in Piscator's production of Rasputin in 1927. His view of theatre as a medium for historical and political education was set out in his book Das Politische Theater (The Political Theatre, 1929).

Piscator lived and worked in the Soviet Union from 1933 to 1936, in France until 1939, and then in the United States. In 1951 he settled in West Germany (unlike Brecht and others who went to East Germany). As the director of the Freie Volksbühne in West Berlin (1962-1966), he produced the premieres of the controversial documentary plays Der Stellvertreter (The Representative, 1963) by Rolf Hochhuth and Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen (The Investigation, 1965) by Peter Weiss. Piscator's work influenced many other directors, such as Joan Littlewood, the founder of the Theatre Workshop in Britain.