Distinguished translator of postwar German plays
Anthony Vivis, who has died suddenly aged 70, was a renowned translator of postwar German plays that habitually documented mythical misery in the urban jungle while relating to the ingrained tradition of Brecht, Georg Büchner, Gerhart Hauptmann and Schiller.
In an age when it is sometimes difficult to apportion blame or praise to a "new version" from a foreign language – since the British playwright is either cribbing from an expert's literal translation, or using other published sources – Vivis's integrity and expertise in what he called "re-creative" playwriting were both paramount and obvious.
In a distinguished career that took him from a publishing house in Berlin to a small office above the Fortune theatre in Covent Garden as the Royal Shakespeare Company's dramaturge at the end of the 1960s, then on to the BBC radio drama department and a fellowship at the University of East Anglia, he never flinched from practical spoken solutions to the problems of recreating a social milieu, or a demotic, working-class argot, and did so with some flair and brilliance.
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.
Some of those plays were collaborations with his second wife, Tinch Minter, in the 1980s. But his work was also increasingly diffused in surgeries, seminars and workshops in Norwich and Newcastle, and he worked closely with WG Sebald, the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, whose robust views on the lack of sensitive translations into English from foreign languages he shared.
Vivis, who traced his own family back to German/Swiss origins in the early 19th century, was the third of four children of Mary and Victor, an RAF flight lieutenant. Anthony was born in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, near the RAF college at Cranwell; after the second world war, his father became a civilian radio instructor there.
The family moved to Locking in Somerset (with another RAF posting), Weston-super-Mare and, finally, Marlow in Buckinghamshire. Vivis, a conspicuously bright boy, was educated at Sir William Borlase's grammar school in Marlow and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied modern and medieval languages, followed by a postgraduate theatre course at Bristol University.
His academic career ran parallel with his practical work in the theatre, which came into focus with The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (a play before it was a film), followed by the same playwright's Bremen Coffee at the Traverse in 1977; this was horrifying realism, the tale of a 19th-century woman who systematically poisoned 15 people and sang glorious hymns afterwards.
Looking back, it is amazing how funny and uplifting a lot of this miserable stuff was: the human condition celebrated in social quirkiness and sexual perversity, no more vividly than in his riveting translation of Karge's solo show, Man to Man, also premiered at the Traverse (in 1987) with an amazing Tilda Swinton adopting the persona of her dead husband in order to get work; the play has just been successfully revived at the Mercury theatre in Colchester, with Tricia Kelly donning the boiler suit.
And what about Kroetz's Dead Soil at the Leicester Haymarket in 1992, in which a peasant girl's miscarriage was stuffed into the maggoty womb of her own dead grandmother? You sometimes feared for a writer's sanity in charting the extremities of such Teutonic angst and self-immolation, only to realise that essential horrible truths about ourselves were also being discussed.
Vivis had a special relationship with the tiny Gate in Notting Hill, west London, too, providing, to quote the critics, flinty, muscular, loosely colloquial and rough and rural translations of Martin Sperr's Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria (co-written with John Grillo), in an audacious promenade production by Dominic Cooke in 1995. The following year came another Cooke "special" – the audience were seated around an oblong pit, staring down at two dozen cramped actors – Hauptmann's The Weavers, a 19th-century classic that established beyond all possible doubt that the Silesian cotton workers were indeed revolting.
Vivis translated countless German poems, including those of the painter Egon Schiele, and wrote dramatic monologues, learned articles in the Times Literary Supplement, several original radio plays of his own, and two important essays on German drama in the Oxford Guide to Literature in Translation.
His first marriage was to Jenny Otterley; both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by two older sisters; a younger brother predeceased him.
• Charles Anthony Vivis, writer and translator, born 22 April 1943; died 6 October 2013
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