The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier

I suggested to once again try something out that can only be achieved here, by us,

I suggested to once again try something out that can only be achieved here, by us, in this particular space.

nothing should be on stage that is not contemporary, and that the stage is always a partner and a tool for the actor.

Using the dramatic situation as the common reference point to communicate avoids the need to become personal and to suggest to an actor that they have done something wrong or inappropriate. Such personal blame is the ultimate killer of any creative energy in the room, as actors will then only be concerned with ‘doing it right’, and not with being in, and responding to, the situation. This in no way means that a director should not offer critique. On the contrary, actors are intelligent enough to know perfectly well when something is really awful.

By way of an example, my reading of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People revolves around the question of what chance truth still has within a society that is entirely defined by economic imperatives. I wanted to investigate the question of whether the economy, the interest of capitalism might impose its own dominance, and whether it might be able to maintain its primacy even in the face of truth, and of rational argument. This was my whole starting point, my ‘concept’, if you wish to insist on this word.

It takes to its extreme the disconnect of the identity between language and speaker/character: language has entirely ceased to be an individual’s expression. In the work of the best playwrights, those who do not merely copy an artistic form, postdramatic theatre reveals itself as the ultimate realist theatre.

but behind it is a realistic, situational world. It expresses a world that is as grotesquely inflated, beyond all proportions, as the language;

Thomas Bernhard, Werner Schwab

Ödön von Horvath

Elfriede Jelinek, for instance in her Merchant’s Contracts