Goerden’s teachers were Andrea Breth, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson and Peter Stein, whose work he became familiar with as assistant director at the Berliner Schaubühne. He spent “happy years” there he once said in an interview. Goerden himself only produced a single play at the Schaubühne, Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” (1994), his “journeyman’s piece”. He became famous quickly with his second piece of direction, Karl Philipp Moritz’s horror drama “Blunt or The Guest”, which was long considered impossible to produce, at the Staatstheater in Stuttgart, with which he was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen in 1996. This was the best actors’ theatre. Critics spoke of an “abrupt, unexpected, small theatrical miracle”, Goerden called it “anthropology”. He continued this with classics, such as Chekhov’s “Ivanov” and Schiller’s “Maria Stuart”, in which – carefully updated – he drew out often new, surprising aspects.
Since then, carefully listening to texts and investigating their potential for today has been considered to be Goerden’s speciality. Thus, for example, for many years he intensively concerned himself with the play that he put on in 2003 at the Residenztheater in Munich in a light, modernised production, freed of all ideological weight: Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise”. Goerden, who cooperates closely with the designer duo Silvia Merlo and Ulf Stengl, set the play in a lounge in Ben Gurion Airport, a universal no-man’s land, in which the businessman Nathan is a global player of today and the famous ring parable is a fairy story from his box of tricks. Moral solution models are left out.
According to Goerden, tolerance is a matter for people who can afford it. Goerden had already done the intellectual groundwork for Lessing’s play in 1999. Then, he rewrote the old schoolbook classic and had Shakespeare’s character Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice” join Nathan. Under the title “Lessing’s Dream of Nathan the Wise”, he dramatised the discursive text collage on the subject of anti-Semitism and tolerance at his home theatre of the time, Stuttgart Staatstheatre. This was philosophical theatre for the mind, ethically well intentioned, but also aesthetically well made. Goerden thus once again proved that he was a representative of a new seriousness in the German theatre.
Conscientiousness and humility when faced with the text characterise all of his work. This is just one aspect of the spiritual affinity that connects him to Dieter Dorn, who brought him to the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel. He launched his career in Munich with Peter Handke’s unwieldy play “The Game of Questioning or The Journey to the Sonorous Land”, a philosophically garbled text that had never been performed again since its premiere by Claus Peymann in 1990. Goerden found it child’s play to lighten the weight and to get the better of Handke’s holy seriousness with quiet comedy and the poetic magic of the theatre. And with Corneille’s horrific tragedy “Rodogune”, he rediscovered a difficult text for the stage – one that had once been severely slated by Lessing. Goerden did not make it into a bloody battlefield – just as subsequently in “Titus Andronicus” – much rather, it became a celebration of actors and language, aesthetically cooled. In Goerden’s productions the head usually wins out over the heart, exegesis over imagination. This is what we call an analyst.
