She presented one of her greatest in 1997 at the Nationaltheater in Mannheim with “The Secret of Life – A Seminar of Murderesses”. The starting point for the scenic study of women who murder was the French Papin sisters, who attacked their mistress and her daughter like avenging angels in the 1930s. The exegesis about murderesses succeeded because Barbara Frey countered the conventional ideas of out-and-out lust for murder by setting the evening in a library and made the Papin sisters into colourful librarians.
During this project work, Barbara Frey travelled on several tracks and developed her own style as a director. In 1999 she achieved a remarkable production with the presentation of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s “Roberto Zucco” at Basel Theatre. On the one hand she once again revealed how much she is interested in the subject of the inexplicably evil. She showed the killer without using the clichés of monstrosity. Roberto Zucco was given shape in that other characters in the play reacted to him.
At the start of the 1999/2000 season Barbara Frey moved as a permanent in-house director to the Berlin Schaubühne and the team around Thomas Ostermeier. In this time, she produced Alfred Jarry’s “King Ubu” and the premiere of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s “A Long Time Ago in May”. The cooperation ended in early 2001.
Since then, Barbara Frey has been working under Dieter Dorn at the Bayerisches Schauspiel Munich and at Basel Theatre, where she presented one of her best productions to date in 2003 with the premiere of the play “The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents” by Lukas Bärfuss. At the centre of this play is fifteen-year-old Dora, who is not quite mistress of her senses, has long been pacified with medicine and lives in a twilight zone. When she stops taking her medicine, she discovers life, men and lust. Barbara Frey set it in an artistic sofa landscape, trenchantly and with a great sense of atmospheric changes. The play and production were invited to the Mülheim Theatertage.
Since leaving the Berlin Schaubühne, Barbara Frey has decisively turned to the classics and redefined her directorial work. The result is a production style that thoroughly investigates the text without surrendering to it in humility. At the end of 2003 she produced Heinrich von Kleist’s “Amphitryon” in Basel, set the linguistic work of art on confused identities at the court of the King of Thebes in a beach environment with bungalows on stilts and placed nightmarish scenes next to sheer comedy.
“When I am dealing with the classics this discussion about the theatre of yesterday and today doesn't exist for me,” says Barbara Frey. “Kleist, for example, is extremely contemporary for me because he asks far-reaching questions about identity, subjectivity and the fragility of the world.”
With her most recent productions, above all, Barbara Frey has made it clear that, beyond playing for effects, she is an interpreting director who is seeking modern content in great classic material – as in “Tales from the Vienna Woods”. She directed Horvath’s play in 2005 as a coproduction between the Salzburg Festival and the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, creating moments “of a paradisiacal, embarrassing freedom” (Die Zeit).
Since the start of the 2006/2007 season, Barbara Frey has held a permanent position at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, where she has staged Euripides’ “Medea”. She also continues to receive regular commissions from the Zurich Schauspielhaus. There she will take the direction in 2009.
