However, when the City of Munich and the then Head of Culture, Julian Nida-Rümelin, decided not to extend Dorn’s contract and to install Frank Baumbauer as his successor instead, Dorn left in anger at the end of the 2000/2001 season. Nevertheless, with his tried and tested literary and ensemble theatre, he is still shaping theatrical life in Munich: as manager of the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, which he took over in the autumn of 2001.
Dorn’s career began in the early 1970s at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and at the Staatliche Schaubühnen in Berlin, where he drew attention to himself with remarkable productions in tandem with head literary manager Ernst Wendt. In 1976 Hans-Reinhard Müller took him to the Munich Kammerspiele as senior director. He enjoyed a magnificent success with his very first production, Lessing’s “Minna von Barnhelm” (with Cornelia Froboess). The play was the start of a long series of classic productions that Dorn presented over the next two decades, with his special loves being first of all Goethe, then Kleist and, of course, over and over: Shakespeare.
In his time at the Kammerspiele Dieter Dorn produced six Shakespeare plays, almost always without cuts: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1978), “Twelfth Night” (1980), “Troilus and Cressida” (1986), “King Lear” (1992), “The Tempest” “ (1994) and “Cymbeline” (1998). The literary manager Michael Wachsmann, Dorn’s right hand and, since 1986, the theatre’s artistic director, made new translations of all of the texts. Jürgen Rose built the large empty spaces for them – mostly with a podium on the stage –, where the actors were always at the centre.
All of these productions, which came about after months of rehearsals, were elaborate studies of texts and people according to the method: “not from the greatness to the detail, but from the detail to the greatness”. Dorn once said that the claim is in the language, “that is the agreement”. Rolf Boysen, one of the most important protagonists in the ensemble – who played Lear, for example –, honoured the Shakespeare director Dorn as a “master of the art of making the exceptional visible in the commonplace”.
As a manager, Dorn also gave lots of space to contemporary theatre. He, himself, produced works by Tankred Dorst, Arthur Kopit, David Mamet and, over and over again, the dramas of Botho Strauß, with whom he is linked by a tendency towards the higher-class light theatre and a critical-conservative stance towards society. Dorn has premiered three Strauß plays: “Visitor” (1988), “Final Chorus” (1991) and the disputed Odysseus returnee story “Ithaka” (1996, with Bruno Ganz). Furthermore, he has produced “Big and Small” (1979), “Kalldewey, Farce” (1983), “The Park” (1984) and “Seven Doors” (1988). In 2002 “The Fool and His Wife This Evening in Pancomedia” followed at the Residenztheater Munich.
25 years of Munich Kammerspiele with and under Dieter Dorn – that is a quarter of a century of theatre history, but also a love story with the Munich audience, which gave the theatre fantastic ticket sales. The great plus of Dorn’s theatre was always the first-class ensemble, which included artists such as Sunnyi Melles, Gisela Stein, Sibylle Canonica, Lambert Hamel, Romuald Pekny, Helmut Griem and Peter Lühr. However, in the last few years of his management, the critical voices who saw a high-class boutique and the risk of aesthetic ossification in Dorn’s noble temple of art also increased.
Dorn opened his management of the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel with Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”, a production that offered great theatre in the familiar way but refrained from an explicit political interpretation for today. A refusal of “fashions and modernism” and radical aesthetics continues to determine Dorn’s work in the new theatre. He is banking on continuity and, with his ensemble – who followed him to the Residenztheater – is maintaining timeless narrative and literary theatre, what he once described as “magical realism theatre”.
