Her actual directorial career started with the triumph that celebrated her Freiburg production of García Lorca’s “The House of Bernada Alba” at the Berliner Theatertreffen in 1985. Via Bochum and Vienna she arrived at the Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, where she was artistic director from 1992 to 1997. And when this phase ultimately ended with fierce conflicts with parts of the ensemble, her great achievement remains undisputed: in the shadow of the “legend” Peter Stein, she had taken over the most important German theatre in a crisis and had been able to stabilise it for many years with her productions. The fact that at that time such a managerial position was taken by a woman undoubtedly had an exemplary character for the upcoming generation of younger female directors and theatre managers.
Andrea Breth’s directorial style is in the tradition of Fritz Kortner’s and Peter Stein’s poetic and psychological realism. She sees herself as an anthropologist, someone who looks into souls – but never just in a biographical-social sense, but much rather in a universal-human sense. She does not shy from the mythic and metaphysical dimension – for example, in 1990 she darkened Kleist’s comedy “The Broken Pitcher” in Vienna into a monumental tragedy about humanity, concerning the Fall and the banishment from Eden.
And she believes that “contemporary” theatre is also there to pose questions about spirituality and religion. “If you can no longer understand that man is in an alliance with God, then you have to leave the play alone,” she said about her work on Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at Berlin’s Schaubühne (1998).
However obsessive such a design may sometimes appear, it never petrifies into a hypothesis on the stage: it is always about people, their dreams and desires, the shattering of these emotions. Her stories often darken into dramas of hopelessness: happiness is only a hope, not reality. Even when the director decided on Goethe’s early ending of “Stella” (1999) – a merry utopian ménage-a-trois – she produced a dark play where people retreated into pain and loneliness.
In spite of all respect for the director’s crafts and ability, critics have not wanted to follow some of her works: the hermetic seal of the emotional language, coupled with perfectionism, has brought some productions, especially those in the last few years at the Berlin Schaubühne, to the edge of petrification. This makes it all the more noticeable that in her current position as in-house director at Vienna's Burgtheater Breth has apparently discovered a new path for herself. More than in the past she is interested in texts by contemporary writers and she has also discovered a surprising lightness in her dealings with the classics.
She set Lessing’s “Emilia Galotti” (2002) in a modern mafia Italy; she produced the bourgeois tragedy, free from the burden of historic significance, as a play of nervous emotions between narcissistic love and deadly seriousness with a speed that is completely untypical for her.
The production was invited to the 2003 Theatertreffen. It was her seventh nomination for Berlin – that, too, illustrates the extraordinary standing of this director in German-language theatre.
