Silvion Oscar Lewenstein was a British theatre and film producer, who helped create some of the leading British theatre and film productions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Background
Born in Hackney, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had fled antisemitism, Lewenstein spent most of his childhood in Hove, Sussex. His father"s formerly successful plywood business went into a decline during his teens, the family returned to London, and the younger Lewenstein left school.
Career
Lewenstein co-founded the English Stage Company in 1954 with director George Devine and dramatist Ronald Duncan. In the West End he produced Bertolt Brecht"s The Threepenny Opera in 1956 and Saint Joan of the Stockyards in 1964. He was also responsible for three of Joan Littlewood"s Theatre Workshop productions, including Brendan Behan"s The Hostage and Shelagh Delaney"s A Taste of Honey transferring to the West End at around the same time, to the detriment of Littlewood"s company.
Lewenstein was the producer of, among other films, The Knack..and How to Get lieutenant (1965) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987).
Earlier he had been involved in supervising Tom Jones (1963) and other Woodfall films, a company of which he was a director from 1961 to 1967. Lewenstein optioned Joe Orton"s screenplay Up Against lieutenant after Brian Epstein, the manager of The Beatles, had rejected it as a project for his clients, but the film was never made.
The theatre and film director Lindsay Anderson, who thought Lewenstein was "the strangest mixture of foolishness and (sometimes) good intuitions" worked with him on The White Business (1967), a short film based on one of Shelagh Delaney"s short stories. In 1970, after Neville Blond died, Lewenstein became chairman of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre jointly with Robin Fox, and then sole chairman in 1971 after Fox died.
He went on to be artistic director of the English Stage Company from 1972 to 1975, after two years as chairman.
In October 1974, Lewenstein instigated a letter to The Times, signed by 13 other theatre directors, over a perception that the funding of the new National Theatre building would starve the rest of subsided theatre in Britain. Peter Hall, then Northwest Territories artistic director, called him a "shit and a creep" to his face in a chance encounter at the National Film Theatre. Lewenstein"s memoir Kicking Against the Pricks: A Theatre Producer Looks Back was published in 1994 by Nick Hern Books.
Politics
Among the thousands who had left the Communist Party in 1956, Lewenstein remained a socialist for the rest of his life.
Membership
A former member of the Young Communist League, now active in the Communist Party itself, he became involved in the Unity Theatre movement via his friendship with Ted Willis.