The Poetry of Things Past

Abstract

One of the celebrated European directors of his generation, Alvis Hermanis has been the artistic director of the New Riga Theatre in Latvia for twelve years. Trained as an actor who worked in theatre and film before he turned to directing classics and contemporary plays and adaptations of fiction more than two decades ago, in 2007 he received the European Prize for New Theatrical Realities in Thessaloniki. In recent years he has directed several new works with his company, including Sonia (after a short story by Tatyana Tolstaya), Long Life, Latvian Stories, Story about Kaspar Hauser, In the Burning Darkness by Antonio Buero Vallejo, Fathers, and The Government Inspector, for which he received the Young Directors Award in Salzburg in 2003. At a time when European theatre is characterized by the dominance of the director, Hermanis is devoted to the actor, and instead of highconcept stagings of the world repertoire, he often draws on the stories of ordinary people. The New Theatre of Riga has performed at major theatres and festivals in Europe, Russia, Asia, Latin America, and Canada—in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Singapore, Santiago, Avignon, Helsinki, Madrid, Lisbon, Brussels, Zurich, Montreal, Edinburgh—and in November 2009 Hermanis will stage two Isaac Bashevis Singer stories for the Munich Kammerspiele, and then adapt a Jaroslav Iwaskiewicz novel for Italian actors. For the Vienna Burgtheater, he is planning a production of August: Osage County, which received the Pulitzer Prize last year. I interviewed Hermanis in Cologne during the run at Halle Kalk (Schauspielhaus Koln) of The Sound of Silence, a three-and-a-quarter hour piece co-produced by the Berliner Festspiele, and based solely on the physical action of the actors and the recorded songs of Simon and Garfunkel. Our conversation took place on March 23, 2009.