Stefan Bachmann
Born in Zürich in 1966. Studied German Literature and Literary Studies in Zürich and German Literature, Theatre and Religious Studies in Berlin. In 1992 he co-founded the Berlin Theatre company Theater Affekt together with Ricarda Beilharz, Thomas Jonigk, Tom Till and Lars-Ole Walburg. The group attracted national attention with productions of Kleist’s «Penthesilea» and Goethe’s Singspiel «Lila». From 1993 he directed productions at Schauspiel Bonn, the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, the Theater am Neumarkt in Zurich and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In 1998 Stefan Bachmann became Drama Director at Theater Basel, which was voted Theatre of the Year for 1999 in the critics’ poll run by «Theater heute» magazine. Since 2001 he has also directed operas. Stefan Bachmann has worked as a freelance director at the Vienna Burgtheater, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin and the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. In 2008 he won the Austrian Theatre Prize NESTROY for his production of Wajdi Mouawad’s «Scorched» and another NESTROY in 2013 for his production of Elfriede Jelinek’s «Winterreise». Stefan Bachmann has been Artistic Director of Schauspiel Köln since 2013.
Productions
A caretaker is murdered with no reason or motive. Alienated from himself and life in general by a working day that is always the same, a bank clerk seizes an axe and commits murder. This action lacking any obvious cause shocks state prosecutor Martin, who is in charge of the case. In the murder and his crime he can see a reflection of his own imprisonment in a bourgeois existence dominated by duty, law and order. The prosecutor is immediately struck by an existential fear that drives him to escape into the fairy tale world of a mysterious alter ego: the world of Count Öderland.
Graf Öderland (Count Öderland)
With «Success», we journey into the inner workings of a society in which everything is measured in terms of personal career advantage, the demands of embittered contemporaries, hatred of one’s neighbours, anger at those with a different political opinion and one’s own lack of any sense of direction.
Erfolg (SUCCESS)