It is noticeable that in his work Bachmann keeps going to texts that are far apart from each other and that are otherwise paid little attention in the theatre. Examples of this are Pierre Corneille’s “The Illusion” and Frank Wedekind’s “Franziska”. Stefan Bachmann once described what he was looking for and what interested him most: “In my narrative style on the stage I am not concerned with unambiguity. On the one hand, I find it so difficult that it is so difficult being unambiguous. On the other hand, I am naturally only interested in what is complex and complicated because it corresponds to our modern perception of the world.”
This basic attitude, starting from an ambivalence and complexity of modern worlds, was decisive for his four years of directing in Basel. The schedules repeatedly contain apparently distant positions, such as Wolfgang Bauer’s “Magic Afternoon” and Tankred Dorst’s “Merlin”. Bachmann was probing in three directions. On the one hand, he was searching the 1960s and assured himself of the history of pop. The high point of this search for traces was his 1999 premiere of Rainald Goetz’s “Jeff Koons” at Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus. Bachmann’s look at the artist who stylised himself into a pop icon was highly praised. “Theater heute” said that the production “effectively circumvents the business conditions of an artistic enterprise that, above all, takes itself seriously.”
However, Stefan Bachmann has also turned to the great myths and, in Dorst’s “Merlin” searched for the original of education sentimentale together with Parzival. The third prop of Bachmann the director are the classical works that he stages in a unique dramatisation – as in the case of Goethe’s “Elected Affinities”. In the production that he completed at Zurich’s Neumarkt Theatre in 1995 and resumed in Basel, he searched human souls that attract and repulse each other. Above all, the choice of cleverly illuminated dialogues, in which Bachmann sprinkled comic-strip-like passages and ironic mutations, were highly convincing.
Stefan Bachmann laid the foundation stone for his subsequent work as director of acting in Basel in the early 1990s with a production community of directors, literary managers and set designers. One member of “Theater Affekt” was the writer Thomas Jonigk, whose plays “You Shall Give Me Grandsons” (1994) and “The Aggressors” (2000) Bachmann were given national or international premieres by Bachmann. Other close collaborators from the “Affekt” period, such as the set designer Ricarda Beilharz, moved to Basel with him. Lars-Ole Walburg, who was a literary manager at his side for a long time, increasingly – as earlier – took over directorial work and became Bachmann’s successor as director of actor in Basel.
Stefan Bachmann had his last great directorial success to date in early 2003 with Paul Claudel’s monumental play “The Satin Slippper”. This journey around the world is a mixture of baroque international theatre and expressionist conversation drama. Bachmann went into every branch of the text for eight hours and produced the play on a specially built stage in the foyer of Basel Theatre. At the end of the 2002/2003 season Stefan Bachmann, who now also produces operas, took his leave of the stage for the time being and set off an a journey around the world with his family.
He then made his second debut as a freelance director in 2005 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin with Kleist’s “Amphitryon”, which was also seen as a guest production at the Salzburg Festival. When this was followed up with Ferdinand Raimund’s farce “The Spendthrift” at the Vienna Burgtheater, it was clear that, even after his year off, Bachmann was going to stay true to his principle of exploring ambivalence and complexity in plays that could hardly be further apart in terms of their subject matter.
This was confirmed at the very beginning of the 2006/2007 season when he returned to themes from earlier in his career: Bachmann directed the second ever production of Thomas Jonigk’s new play “You Hear My Secret Call” for Amélie Niermeyer’s debut season at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, before moving on to the Thalia Theater Hamburg to stage the German premiere of Jonigk’s “Dear Cannibals Godard”, which is based on Godard’s “Weekend”. He therefore found himself collaborating with his colleague from the early days of Theater Affekt twice within a short period of time.
In March 2007, Stefan Bachmann continued where he had left off in Basel by staging Paul Claudel’s historical trilogy “The Godless” during Armin Petras’s opening season as artistic director at the Gorki Theatre in Berlin.
