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7 MICHAEL THALHEIMER ichael Thalheimer was born in 1965 in Münster, near Frankfurt am Main. He began his artistic career as a drummer , then studied from 1985 to 1989 and graduated from the University for Music and Theatre in Bern, Switzerland. He began his theatrical career as an actor, appearing in Bern, then in Mainz and Bremerhaven, though without great success. He first turned his hand to directing in 1997 with a production of Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria at the Chemnitz Theatre , followed the next year by the German premiere of the same dramatist’s The Uncontrolled Laughter of the Lilliputians in Basel. That same year in Senftenberg he presented Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag. During his first three years as a director, he worked in a variety of theatres, among them in Leipzig, Freiburg, and Dresden, experimenting with a wide variety of plays, from classic authors such as Goethe, Shakespeare, and Camus to moderns like Müller, Turrini, and Widmer. Of these early productions, only his Hamlet, presented in Freiburg in February 1999, attracted anything other than local attention. Theater heute provided its first Thalheimer review, but found the Hamlet cold, abstract, and futuristic . Designer Olaf Altmann, who would remain Thalheimer’s most frequent collaborator, created a deep and open set, with a floor composed of broad black and white stripes “which naturally created irritating visual swimming patterns when the turntable moved.”1 Klaus Brömmelmeier played Hamlet as a cool, modern master of ceremonies, whose passing was accompanied by Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way.” Thalheimer’s first important success as a director came with his production of Ödön von Horváth’s Kasimir und Karoline at the Leipzig theatre in November 1999. Once again Altmann created a cool, empty stage, now with a checkerboard floor, upon which actors in modern dress displayed their inner conflicts in a three-hour sequence of dancelike movements, music, and bursts of speech that was far removed from the traditional narrative approach to this play. So unconventional an approach at first stunned but then fascinated the public, and clearly prefigured the style that would characterize most of Thalheimer’s subsequent productions. Thalheimer suddenly burst into German theatrical consciousness in 2000, when two of his productions were selected for presentation in the annual Berlin Theatertreffen. The selection of even a single production out of the ten chosen from the entire German-speaking theatre would have been a significant achievement , but the selection of two, by a young director hitherto almost unknown to the German theatre public, was unprecedented and immediately catapulted Thalheimer to the front rank of the new generation of German directors. His M 142 sudden elevation to this position recalled the similar sudden emergence of his contemporary Thomas Ostermeier just a few years earlier, and the remark made in Theater heute in 1998 could be applied with equal accuracy to Thalheimer two years later: “Only a year ago (almost) nobody had heard of him, while today everybody is talking about him and with him.”2 Although in 1998 Ostermeier was chosen as director of the year and this honor eluded Thalheimer, in 2001 he came very close to achieving that as well. That year Zadek was chosen for one of the most highly praised stagings of his distinguished career, his Vienna Rosmersholm , but in the balloting he in fact exceeded Thalheimer by only a single vote.3 The two plays whose staging brought such attention to Thalheimer came from strikingly dissimilar traditions and represented radically different production approaches. The first, presented in the fall of 2000 in Dresden, was a very hard-edged naturalistic contemporary family tragedy from Scandianavia, Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov’s Das Fest (The Celebration). The other, presented near the end of the year in Hamburg, was a rather fanciful and sentimental central European classic, Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (better known to American audiences from its musicalization as Carousel). Das Fest offered both a type of play and a type of production that stands clearly outside the main line of Thalheimer’s work. It was not drawn from the classic repertoire, indeed was not based on a play at all but on a prize-winning film of the same name created by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Moreover the film was the first and most famous example of a new sort of film experiment, the Dogma film, whose aesthetics and techniques would seem particularly...

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