Changes in the city’s theater management may not be as significant as a change of government, but in some cities one still gets the impression that the appointment of a new artistic director is a state ceremony. This year this is all the more true, as three of the largest theaters in the German-speaking world are changing hands. At the Burgtheater in Vienna, which is considered the most important theater in the world, the current artistic director Stefan Bachmann from Cologne is to take over and has already settled into his job. At the Schauspielhaus Zurich and Schauspiel Köln, the incumbent artistic directors are currently leaving, but the new ones are still contractually bound to other jobs and cannot take up their posts for a year later. More on this later, as the controversial cultural-political question in Vienna and Zurich is why the incumbent artistic directors were only allowed to do their job for five years and why things became turbulent on the artistic director carousel as a result.
This is easier to answer for Vienna than for Zurich: the tenure of Carinthian director Martin Kušej was not really artistically convincing. In other cities this may be fine, but in the case of the Vienna Burgtheater, with the largest permanent ensemble in the world, it was not enough. With the arrival of Kušej’s successor, things could now develop very differently. The Swiss director Bachmann is more playful than his predecessor and more flexible between the poles of tradition and modernity. But what is more important is that as artistic director he moves confidently on culturally and politically mined ground, even when things get frosty. He proved this in Cologne, where he directed the theater for more than ten years and safely guided it through a restructuring phase that was botched by local politics.
Challenging task in Vienna
Whether he can hold his own in Vienna, however, also depends on how he manages to integrate the ten new actors into the ensemble who are traveling with him to the beautiful blue Danube. Bachmann is a “theater dad” who can deal with acting geniuses. In Vienna, however, this is a more demanding task than in Zurich, for example, where the board of directors of the Schauspielhaus deliberately hired a duo of artistic directors more than five years ago: the celebrated director Nicolas Stemann and the dramaturge Benjamin von Blomberg.
In Zurich, people hoped that Stemann would be as successful with his pop style of direction as he had been at the big theaters in Berlin and Hamburg. But they also wanted to make the Zurich theater more diverse and make the command hierarchy flatter. No one disputes that this was basically successful. In the end, Stemann and von Bloomberg had to leave the city precisely because they did what was expected of them too thoroughly, and Nicolas Stemann commented on this at the end of his term in Zurich with a production of Max Frisch’s modern classic “Biedermann and the Arsonists.” The premiere in March was a clear sign, as Frisch portrays the Swiss Biedermann as a character who wants to be neutral, but who, as a follower, gets involved everywhere and likes to exclude others. In Zurich, the middle class eventually excluded the city’s theater. It is also true, however, that the artistic director duo was unable to convince the audience on Lake Zurich.
The so-called Zurich reflex
The result: a loss of audience, a financial deficit and a cultural-political reaction that can be called the Zurich reflex. The Alpine town is on solid ground, occasionally wants to be avant-garde, but then very quickly becomes afraid of its own courage and tends to make short-circuits – as was the case in 2002, when the board of directors of the Schauspielhaus gave the celebrated theater artist Christoph Marthaler the boot after a short time. Now the first artistic director duo has been hit and unfortunately it looks as if Zurich has learned nothing from it. The same board of directors that appointed the recently fired artistic directors is once again opting for a dual leadership. In future, director Pinar Karabulut will run the Schauspielhaus together with director Rafael Sanchez and there are fears that Karabulut in particular will cause confusion in the middle class of the city and once again trigger the Zurich reflex. She is an aesthetically convincing director, but also a feminist and gender-fair one. Sanchez, on the other hand, is more engaging, but not a celebrated director.
In addition, Sanchez cannot start his job immediately, as he is in charge of the last season in Cologne as interim artistic director for Bachmann, who is moving to Vienna early, before director Kay Voges takes over the theater in the cathedral city. This in turn means that Zurich also needed an interim artistic director and has found one in the highly respected artistic director Ulrich Khuon. He was extremely successful in Hamburg and Berlin and actually wanted to retire, but in the season that is about to begin he is now offering Zurich audiences exactly the art of speaking that they want: classical theater. But only for a year, until the new artistic director duo arrives and unpacks their bags, but may have to leave again as quickly as their predecessors.
