BONDY, LUC

(1948- )

   Director. Through the 1970s and 1980s Bondy was among the most celebrated of free-lance directors in the German theater. A string of invitations to the Berliner Theatertreffen, beginning with his 1974 Bavarian State Theater production of Edward Bond's The Sea, led to several others, among them his 1976 Frankfurt am Main production of Marivaux's The Game of Love and Chance and later Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux's The Triumph of Love (Berlin Schaubühne, 1986). Bondy's 1978 Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus production of Ibsen's Ghosts, two 1981 productions in Cologne (Samuel Beckett's Happy Days and Witold Gombrowicz's Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy), and William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale in 1990 at the Berlin Schaubühne were also invited.

   Bondy studied acting with Jacques LeCoq in Paris before beginning work in Germany as a directing assistant at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. He got his first directing job in Munich in 1973. He has also worked extensively in the French theater, most notably directing new translations of plays by Arthur Schnitzler in Nanterre and by Ibsen in Lausanne. In the 1990s Bondy began directing operas in several European opera houses.