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8 THOMAS OSTERMEIER homas Ostermeier was born in Soltau, Germany, in 1968. He grew up in Bavaria where he received his early schooling and entered the civil service. He became interested in acting, however, and in 1991 went to Berlin where he joined a Faust project being developed by Einar Schleef at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In 1992 he began studies at the Ernst Busch School of Drama in Berlin, the training ground for many of Germany’s contemporary theatre artists. His mentor was Manfred Karge, whom he assisted and for whom he acted in 1993 and 1994 in Weimar and at the Berliner Ensemble. He completed his course of study in 1996 and attracted considerable favorable attention with his thesis production, Research Faust/Artaud. No major director in Germany today enjoyed so meteoric a rise as Ostermeier , but the times and circumstances worked strongly in his favor. In the late 1990s the venerable Deutsches Theater was well established as the reliable home of respectable if not highly challenging bourgeois entertainment. Its Intendant , Thomas Langhoff, had no desire to turn it into anything like the much more radical, youth-oriented Volksbühne under Castorf, but he had a vision of the Deutsches Theater as a kind of national theatre, and for this reason he sought ways to maintain “the bourgeois public that is the basis of our support”1 while also appealing to a younger and more populist audience. With the help of a substantial grant from the state for renovations, Langhoff converted a rather basic, freestanding former rehearsal space on the grounds of the Deutsches Theater, called the “Baracke” (Barracks) into a modest performance space, with a small lobby and dressing rooms. He planned to devote this space to new, youth-oriented theatre. For the opening of the Baracke, Langhoff selected the dark realistic comedy Fat Men in Skirts by American dramatist Nicky Silver, then just becoming noticed in Germany. The play proved intractable for its first German director, and the project stalled. Then Langhoff thought of the young director who had attracted such attention with his recent Faust/Artaud thesis and asked Ostermeier to take over the project. This proved an inspired choice. Ostermeier put together a Baracke trio of himself, dramaturg Jens Hillje, and designer/technician Stefan Schmidke, and their production of the Silver play was an enormous success. Ostermeier and his actors gained high praise for their presentation of “the banality of evil” with “shrewd wit and without fear of tastelessness.”2 Their gritty realism was a revelation to Berlin audiences, especially at the elegant Deutsches Theater. Michael Merschmeier lauded the work in Theater heute: “It is astonishing to encounter such psychological realism at the venerated former DDR theatre under the aegis of Thomas Langhoff.” He concluded, “This is the best way T 161 for the Deutsches Theater to become the chief representative of theatre for the cultured middle-class Berlin public.”3 Ostermeier announced a program at the Baracke of five plays a year, seeking plays that would deal “in the most unadorned way with such subjects as drugs, criminality, sex, and power, to once again reflect reality.”4 Once again conditions strongly favored Ostermeier. Just at this time a new generation of dramatists whose work would fit Ostermeier’s declared program better than the dark, but boulevard-inflected work of Nicky Silver were now appearing in London. Moreover these dramatists, unlike Silver, were totally unknown in Germany, and Ostermeier built his reputation largely on their introduction. Although Ostermeier admired Castorf and in a May 1998 interview called the Volksbühne “the most important theatre in the city,” he also observed that he himself had little interest in the sort of “destruction of plot and character” Castorf pursued. He preferred finding examples of “well done writing” (in English in the original) and respectfully representing such texts. This did not mean, however, the “museum theatre” style of Peter Stein, but a vital and critical engagement with “contemporary authors dealing with material of the here and now.” He cited as his ideal of a director Stephen Daldry, of London’s Royal Court theatre, who had successfully developed such an engagement, producing such authors as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane. Concerning the classics Ostermeier remarked “somewhat flippantly,” “I will create my first Shakespeare when I am forty.”5 Ostermeier’s close association with Daldry and the Royal Court was central to his program and to his success at the Baracke. The two directors visited each other...

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