He is an extreme sportsman among directors and enters into icy cold or burning hot regions with his material. When he produced Wilhelmine von Hillern’s “Vulture Maiden” in Stuttgart, he had designed such a powerful set with his set designer of many years, Martin Zehetgruber, that the audience feared for the actors at first. The curtain rose and revealed a skeleton-like ruin of a tower block. The Alps appeared as a cold and dangerous falling landscape upon which the actors climbed and walked somnambulantly, whereas Kušej used the example of the Vulture Maiden to show that even in the loneliness of Alpine concrete gorges, the relationship between men and women is only a power struggle.
At this time Kušej was already in-house director at the Stuttgart Staatstheater and with Henry Purcell/John Dryden’s dramatic opera “King Arthur” he had already designed a cross-discipline theatre evening and thus taken his first steps towards directing operas. Today he is in demand as a director of operas and mainly produces at the Stuttgart Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival.
There, too, he is a pioneer who interprets opera material with the instruments of a theatre director. This is reminiscent of the Carinthian’s time immediately after his studies. There, too, he crossed boundaries, produced in Austria and Slovenia and brought his own projects, such as “Mobile Skies” onto the stage as well as plays. That was in 1990 at the steirischer herbst in Graz. He had realised the project with his independent group “my friend martin”.
He has no longer carried out his own projects since he was hired by Stuttgarter Staatsschauspiel. But if we look carefully at his directorial CV, it is noticeable that, unlike other directors, he does not set great store by collecting the usual cross-section of productions of the classics. He his attracted to tricky material, such as Franz Grillparzer’s “Woe to Him Who Lies!” – or, in the case of Karl Schöner’s “Faith and Homeland” to plays in which the questions of origin and religion, blood and soil are tackled. This also includes Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s “Duke Theodore of Gothland”. This play be the “drunken Shakespeare” (Heine), which is practically never acted, deals with a fictitious war between Finland and Sweden. Kušej collaged the plot around the central sentence “And nothing other than just desperation can save us”, by setting the Grabbe characters like exclamation marks in the sentence.
That was at the start of his time at the Stuttgart Staatstheater, during which he has developed into one of the most important directors in the German-speaking world. Towards the end Martin Kušej brought his as yet most radical production onto the stage with “Cleansed” and made Sarah Kane’s characters into archetypes of a collective nightmare.
In the summer of 2005, Martin Kušej succeeded Jürgen Flimm, taking charge of the drama schedule at the Salzburg Festival, where he made a good impression with both his programming and his own productions. He attracted directors like Stephan Kimmig and René Pollesch to Salzburg, while his own biggest success came with Grillparzer’s “King Ottokar, His Rise and Fall” (2005), a very convincing production in which he read the Austrian historical material consistently as a European political allegory.
Following his executive role at the Salzburg Festival, which was limited to two years, Martin Kušej has been working freelance again in the opera and the theatre since the 2005/2006 season. He is staging Büchner’s “Woyzeck” at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel towards the end of the 2006/2007 season. In 2011 he will follow there Dieter Dorn as director.
