...Robin Detje Robin Detje Remembering Never-Ever Land How Frank Castorf Reconjured Berlin’s Volksbühne The life of most theater audiences in the United States is easy. Except for those who venture into the underground, they know what to expect when they purchase their tickets...

...” and complicate easy consumerist habits of spectatorship promoted in neoliberal culture and media. © 2016 by Andrew Friedman 2016 Bert Neumann’s set design for Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, directed by Frank Castorf, Volksbühne, Berlin, 2002. Photo: Thomas Aurin Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller...

..., the question of what is “real” is not just a challenge for postmodern theo- directed by Frank Castorf at Berlin’s rists. It is made up of clashing biographies in an ongoing reconstruction of memories Volksbühne, 2001. projected onto...

..., 2005. Photo: his own acting virtuosity within an ambience of deliberate imperfection. Thomas Aurin A similar scenario was set up in Pollesch’s Cappuccetto Rosso, which premiered at the 2005 Salzburg Festival. When Sophie Rois, one of the divas of Frank Castorf’s...

... be this reckless, this precise, this hopeless, this funny I had no idea you could do it this way. Tickets were cheap, and you could grab a sandwich 2 up front in the lobby and leave if you got bored; you could even come back and try it a second time. Frank Castorf s Streetcar, Christoph Schlingensief s takes...

... of Yugoslavia before 1999. The most controversial among them was Frank Castorf’s ver- sion of Dirty Hands (Volksbühne Berlin, 1998), an outstanding theatrical blending of This article is partly based on a paper presented at the International Conference on Theatre...

... contributor to Die Zeit, Süddeutsche sociology, including a best seller on the Zeitung, and other papers. His biography 1960s and sexual liberation, The Pink and the of Frank Castorf, Castorf: Provokation aus Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968. He is Prinzip, was published in 2002...

... be “the crucial and defining activity of direction” (21). The book’s second half applies this analytical wisdom, such as it is, to seven directors and one company — Jürgen Gosch, Michael Thalheimer, tg stan, Andreas Kriegenburg, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers, Frank Castorf, and Thomas Ostermeier...

..., the Volksbuhne has, since the controversial director Frank Castorf was appointed artistic director in 1992 at the age of thirty-five, become Berlin’s most vital theater center. Castorf’s irreverent, slap-in-the-face “Ossi” approach attracts not only...

... Schauspielhaus under the quietly inspired leadership of Frank Baumbauer (now the artistic director of the legendary Munich Kammerspiele). Baumbauer assembled a new generation of directors and dra- maturgs, such as Frank Castorf, Jossi Wieler, Thirza Bruncken, and the dramaturg Tilman Raabke...

... to the workers’ frustration, which mirrored the 86 productions exasperation in East Germa- ny’s former industrial centers. Not surprisingly, it was an East German director, Frank Castorf, who articu- lated the gap between global...

... to the workers’ frustration, which mirrored the 86 productions exasperation in East Germa- ny’s former industrial centers. Not surprisingly, it was an East German director, Frank Castorf, who articu- lated the gap between global...

... to the workers’ frustration, which mirrored the 86 productions exasperation in East Germa- ny’s former industrial centers. Not surprisingly, it was an East German director, Frank Castorf, who articu- lated the gap between global...

... to the workers’ frustration, which mirrored the 86 productions exasperation in East Germa- ny’s former industrial centers. Not surprisingly, it was an East German director, Frank Castorf, who articu- lated the gap between global...

... Castorf (b. 1951), and Andrea Breth (the only woman director, b. 1952) to René Pollesch (b. 1962), Michael Thalheimer (b. 1965), Stefan Pucher (b. 1965), and Thomas Ostermeier (b. 1968, his meteoric career began in 1996 as artistic director of the Baracke, Berlin’s Deutsches Theater’s experi...

... appropriately exposed. Hamlet evokes the traditions of 1968 and after, and the production continues to cause a sensation. In an open letter, twelve well-known theater artists—among them Marthaler, Frank Castorf, Peter Zadek, and Luc Bondy—asked “Dear Minister of the Interior Schily” to buy Lemmer’s share...

... the Mod- ernist project.” Perhaps this approach stems in part from Ginsberg’s strong engage- ment with contemporary German and Swiss theater and opera, inspired by the work of directors Josi Wieler, Christoph Marthaler, and Frank Castorf, and designers Anna Viebroch and Bert Neumann...

... of the real as a discomfort in culture does not lead to an energetic deconstruction that can be experienced as with Frank Castorf s Volksbühne a­esthetics but to an almost classical symbolic, strict, cool structure, to the intelligence of the consciously created emotional form. 14 In the condensation...

..., Lepage, Giorgio Strehler, Olivier Py, Frank Castorf, or another marathon specialist topping the bill. The international stardom of such directors also helps to explain why marathon theater has flourished in recent decades. In their early years, the postwar theater fes- tivals competed for star...

... cultural and political isolation. The plays and biographies of the artists of the Berliner Volks- bühne, at the time the most radical theater in the world, were one example Frank Castorf, Rene Pollesch, Christoph Schlingensief, and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, whose work criticized triumphalist late...