The great Munich director and general manager Dieter Dorn is 85 years old.
He shaped the Münchner Kammerspiele for decades, then the Bavarian State Theater for ten years.
You get old.
Together.
A fact that one doesn't like to think about.
A few years ago Dieter Dorn said that he was amazed every time people spoke to him on the street, enthusiastic Kammerspiele or Residenztheater visitors of yore, reminiscing in blissful memories of an irretrievable evening at the theater.
He was surprised that these people were all quite old.
Until he realized that she and he belonged to the same generation.
Together they set out a good four decades ago to walk the theater path together, to explore the art of acting and sometimes opera.
No, the theater maker and his audience are no longer young.
Not even the actors who started an era with him at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 1976, which was to be crowned with incredible success for 25 years.
And who after this quarter of a century moved with Dorn for ten years to the Bavarian State Theater from 2001.
The prelude to the Kammerspiele was Lessing's “Minna von Barnhelm” with Cornelia Froboess and Helmut Griem, Lambert Hamel and Claus Eberth.
Shakespeare's “Merchant of Venice” with Rolf Boysen and Thomas Holtzmann started out at the Residenztheater.
To say goodbye to both houses, Dorn had chosen a piece by Heinrich von Kleist: “Amphitryon” (2000) with Jens Harzer, Michael Maertens and Sibylle Canonica and “Das Käthchen von Heilbronn” (2011) with the whole “mixed group of predators”, like Dorn liked to call his wonderful actors, and with himself as emperor.
In the 35 seasons in between, the legendary Shakespeare productions, including "Troilus and Cressida" with Tobias Moretti and Sunnyi Melles or "König Lear" with Rolf Boysen, Thomas Holtzman and Heinz Bennent, the grandiose Botho Strauss plays, Goethe's "Faust" , Thomas Bernhard's “Appearances are deceptive” or Yasmina Reza's “The God of Carnage”.
Dieter Dorn worked with great actors like Cornelia Froboess, Jens Harzer and Sunnyi Melles
The boys at that time have grown older and old, and quite a few have long since left the stage of life.
“We stage death, we play dying, sometimes better, sometimes worse, but all aesthetic criteria of art fail before reality.
I don't want to admit that so many actors who have accompanied me all my life or to whom I was simply so attached are no longer alive.
I feel as if they are still around me, ”wrote Dorn in his autobiography“ Play on! ”(Verlag CH Beck), thinking in particular of Gisela Steins, the protagonist of his first great directorial success“ Der Menschenfreund ”in 1971 in Hamburg Playhouse.
Anyone who sees Dieter Dorn, the native of Leipzig, who will be 85 years old this Saturday, cycling through Schwabing or who hears his young-sounding voice on the phone, thinks back to Wagner's "Ring" 2014 in Geneva or the "Così fan tutte" - Production from 1993, which is still in the program of the Bavarian State Opera, who experiences the jubilee in the intellectual confrontation with the current trends of contemporary theater and thereby witnesses his ironic-witty to sarcastic swipes at the cultural scene, for whom the 85, that exclamation mark of a long life, lost its horror.
Agile in his asceticism, unbroken in his charm, awe inspiring in his self-confident modesty and detachment: this is the man who prefers to live in Crete, very close to the gods, addicted to myth, at least a little.
Many of Dieter Dorn's productions have achieved timeless validity
One asks oneself: did Dorn survive?
Theater is a short-term art.
The younger generation of viewers can hardly know his productions, they do not know that the people at the Kammerspiele's box office almost fought over the tickets.
Does melancholy creep into the birthday box?
Is a mourning ribbon wrapped around the past theater years, this lost time?
“We are under the rule of time and we also suffer from it.
But that's not all.
The wonderful thing is that we can play with it as if we were masters of it. ”This is what Rüdiger Safranski writes in his book“ Time ”.
Through art - poetry, language, play - something comes into the world, "what is long gone or what is still pending, what has never existed or what will never exist, the possible and the impossible, the coherent and the nonsensical, in short, everything that is nowhere else but in the imagination ”.
In the best moments of some Dorn productions, this intangible cosmos of time, perhaps even of eternity, could be felt.
That is what Dorn calls the second and third levels in the actor's play.
The theater, he says, “is a very valuable instrument that society makes available to us. It allows us to play through life's borderline experiences in a model way and that also on behalf of the audience. ”No, that doesn't survive. That is to be, that is the always valid claim on art.