Epic theatre directors

Abstract

The connections between politics and theatre have always been close in Germany, with its Intendant system and the dominance of court theatres during the early nineteenth century (see Chapter 1). It is also no accident that it was in Germany that the first director-impresario emerged – as distinct from the actor-managers who dominated the commercial theatres of England and to some extent North America, or the commercial impresarios (such as the Frohmans) who came to control most of the theatres across the United States. This highly influential impresario was Max Reinhardt. Starting in Otto Brahm’s naturalistic and democratic Deutsches Theater in Berlin, he came to dominate the German stage up to the 1930s, in 1906 taking over the Deutsches Theater – where he established an acting school – while founding the Berlin Kammerspiele for experimental productions: the satire of Carl Sternheim, the expressionism of Richard Sorge, his rediscovery of Georg Buchner or Frank Wedekind’s socially explosive plays. He also founded theatres in Vienna and Salzburg, added the huge Circus Schumann building to his Berlin theatrical portfolio in 1918, extended his reach by touring Germany and Hungary every summer, establishing the Salzburg Festival with Richard Strauss in 1920, and mounting vast travelling spectacles like Sumurȗn or The Miracle (London 1911, New York 1924). In a very real sense, then, Reinhardt set the standards for productions across Germany, controlling as he did a significant and highly visible proportion of German-speaking theatre. He epitomizes the socially acceptable and commercial theatre of Germany up until the Nazi era – when his whole theatrical empire was confiscated because of his Jewish heritage – and he can be seen as the symbolic representative of commercial theatre across Europe, England and America (where in the 1930s he produced Hollywood films). Partly because of the responsibilities of managing so many venues, as well as from directing large-scale productions, Reinhardt became the model of the controlling autocrat with meticulously annotated Director’s Books covering every move and gesture of the performance, and his work as a director is dealt with in Chapter 5.