Simon Stone is an Australian film and theatre director, writer and actor.
Biography
Early life
Stone is Australian, but was born in Basel and grew up in Cambridge and Melbourne. His father, Stuart Stone, was a biochemist and his mother, Eleanor Mackie, a veterinary scientist. Stuart Stone died of a heart attack aged 45; Stone, aged 12, witnessed it, and has spoken about the ways in which that trauma has influenced his work.
Hayloft Project, 2007-9
In 2007 Stone founded the independent theatre company The Hayloft Project and adapted and directed their inaugural production of Frank Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen. This production was remounted in 2008 at Belvoir St Theatre and was described in The Sydney Morning Herald as "a lean, contained, ultimately furious, liberating production that is well-attuned to Wedekind's poetic rhythms, wit and pubescent discoveries." Other productions Stone adapted and directed for The Hayloft Project include Platonov, 3xSisters, The Suicide and The Only Child, a new version of Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf which won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Independent Production.
Stone is one of the most acclaimed theatre directors on the international circuit, working with several of the most significant companies in European Theatre. For Theater Basel, where he was a house director from 2015, he has directed Angels in America, John Gabriel Borkman, Three Sisters and the opera die tote Stadt. For Ivo van Hove's company Toneelgroep Amsterdam, he has directed Medea in his own new adaptation, Husbands and Wives and Ibsen House, a new play by Stone which threads together the plots of several of Ibsen's plays in a new modern scenario. A companion project with the works of August Strindberg, Hotel Strindberg, premiered at Theater Basel in 2018. In 2016, Stone premiered an adaptation of Federico García Lorca's Yerma at the Young Vic in London. The production starred Billie Piper in the title role, and was well reviewed, returning for a second run in 2017 before transferring to New York in 2018. It won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Revival in 2017. Stone directed Luigi Cherubini's opera version of .
Acting work
Stone has acted in the television series John Safran's Music Jamboree, MDA, Blue Heelers, Rush, City Homicide, and the films Jindabyne, Kokoda, Balibo, Blame, and The Eye of the Storm.
Stone married Jessamy Dyer in 2004 though the marriage ended in divorce. He has since married again.
Philosophy
Stone likes to take pieces from the standard theatre canon which, with the help of his cast, he reworks into intimate, almost cinematic performances. He often works from improvisation creating an entirely new script through which the original play nevertheless shines. This practice is sometimes referred to as "over-writing". Stone believes in theatre as a place for polemic: "One can't make theatre based on fear and compromises. Without argument, there is no art." Yet, at the same time, he acknowledges that his own art has its roots in finding a language for the trauma of his father's death. "I certainly couldn't talk to people about what had happened to me. Especially at a young age, people are very confronted by 'how on earth do I even talk about that absurdly dark thing that happened to Simon?'. Of course, in cinema and literature, you find conversation partners. They're not talking back but they kind of are because they're telling you you're not the only person who's been through that thing."
