No director of the generation that has just established itself at the major German theatres appears to have such direct access to the essence of drama as Florian Fiedler. His productions touch on the roots of the art. At beautiful moments, they seem to have been created out of pure pleasure in performance and transformation. This makes his stagings refreshingly stimulating, direct and clear. Fiedler also tackles the big subjects quite directly, as if they were not encumbered by earlier interpretations. He does not work through layers of tradition in order to get at a work and its deeper meaning – although he has nothing against close textual analysis. Instead, when he is working on old texts, he goes straight for the emotions that are preserved in the work.
In Frankfurt, for example, Fiedler directed Goethe’s rococo novel “The Sufferings of Young Werther” with the three protagonists, Lotte, Werther and Albert, played as a wannabe rock band wildly thrashing their air guitars, uninhibitedly intoxicated by emotion and unselfconsciously taking pleasure in life. It was a reinvention of Storm and Stress inspired by the spirit of pop. All the characters wallowed in the flood of emotion, including Lotte, but she found her way out of the morass of love again, while Werther remained imprisoned in his ecstasy and tried to use stage diving as a way of forcing himself to be happy: flying headfirst through a wall of cardboard boxes.
Until now, Fiedler’s main subject has been youth and the precarious feelings we go through on the threshold of adulthood. He has been interested in the difficulties involved in delimiting oneself from the adult world and explored the contradictions inherent in having to be a part of that adult world but not giving up one’s individuality. His productions were self-assertions, they contained the knowledge that adults often want far more from children than children want from adults. “Growing up is made much more difficult by adults’ lack of detachment,” Fiedler says today about the big theme of his first few years in the theatre. But his early preoccupation with the issue is now a thing of the past: The conclusion of this phase came with his production of Marius von Mayenburg’s play “Fire Face” in Düsseldorf.
Since then, Florian Fiedler has been searching. This does not mean he translates something he has already discovered onto the stage, it means he uses the stage for his search. For example, he would very much like to direct political theatre, he wants to reach and influence the audience’s consciousness, but he does not yet know how he would like to do this. So he is prepared to wait for the time being. Instead, he has been directing plays like Aki Kaurismäki’s “I Hired a Contract Killer”, another piece staged at the schmidtstraße in Frankfurt. It was extremely slow, blue and melancholic, not at all what one would have expected from Fiedler. Indeed, the most important thing for him in this production was coping with the long moments when nothing happens on stage.
Florian Fiedler discovered the theatre when he was working as a prompter. In those days, he used to be surprised, above all, that directors did not realise what beautiful things had been created on the stage. This is one of Fiedler’s qualities: He takes what comes with amiable attentiveness, and he seems to love actors – as he loves people in general. Florian Fiedler, one of the youngest of the young German directors, born in 1977, is making his way in the theatrical world. He is open-minded. He will surprise himself and us. And from now until 2009, he will be in charge of the schmidtstraße venue in Frankfurt, the schauspiel frankfurt’s studio theatre, where there are plans for him to direct “Fahrenheit 451” and “Death of a Salesman”.
Peter Michalzik
Translated by Martin Pearce
