He often allowed several weeks for this process of discovery. Instead of immediate directing, he subtly encouraged and challenged the actors to go deeper into the personalities of the plays.
His collaboration with stage designers was similar. He often worked with them over a longer period of time or for the duration of his entire career. The publication "Peter Zadek and his stage designs" portrays nine of these collaborations. The individual chapters begin with Zadek's personal recollections, followed by brief reviews of jointly staged plays in Zadek’s own words, and sometimes a conversation between Zadek and the respective stage designer. Each chapter ends with an interview in which the editor of the publication, Elisabeth Plessen (born 1944), also Zadek's partner in life, asks the respective stage designer about memories of working with Zadek. The description of the creation of the sets from the perspective of both Zadek and each stage designer not only reconstructs the creative process, but also gives an impression of the final performance.
Zadek was convinced "that the stage designer must invent the space [...] in which the director and the actors can find the maximum tension and the greatest harmonic unison. This means, therefore, that the stage designer must not only have imagination of the play, but also a psychological understanding for the director and even for the particular actors of that performance"1 . His statement reflects his working method of giving those involved in a production the greatest possible freedom to enrich the play with their own ideas and, through the process of experimenting, to bring them together to form the overall work. It is easy to imagine that this process was not always without conflict. The lighting technician Susanne Auffermann (born 1963), who worked with Zadek for over twenty years, describes his working method in her contribution as a "long path of storms, battles, new achievements, passions, deliberate actions or moments in which one thing miraculously joined another to finally find its beautiful, soulful completion. Human theatre... 2.
1 Peter Zadek über Wilfried Minks – Bühnenräume. In: Peter Zadek und seine Bühnenbilder. Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Akademie der Künste Berlin von Elisabeth Plessen. Berlin : Akademie der Künste, 2012, p. 21
2 Ibd., p. 162
