In the same year, she brought Inez van Dullemen’s “Write Me in the Sand” about incest and child sex abuse onto the stage. Event there, although she dealt with material critical of the age, she developed a directorial style that rejected a superficial stage documentarianism. Her treatment of the incestuous abusive involvement of a father and a daughter was praised by critics as a production in which “the monstrous case, the remote media event becomes a neighbourhood tragedy: shabby and affecting”.
Even in early productions, Amélie Niermeyer made it clear that she was concerned about urgent stage atmosphere and physical contact with the audience. This is the case both with staging socially critical plays and with the great classics. But it is especially the case when Amélie Niermeyer keeps turning to plays from various centuries that reflect the role of women in changing social contexts. In 1998 she produced Elfriede Jelinek’s “Illness or Modern Women” in Munich’s Cuivillièstheater, one year later Goethe’s “Stella” at the Frankfurter Schauspiel. The premiere of Simone Schneider’s “The Lady of the Camellias”, which she produced at the Frankfurter Schauspiel in 2000, too, should also be seen in this context. Her new staging of Dumas’s novel showed the most famous sufferer of TB in world literature as a women who fluctuates between thin-skinned fatalism and quick-tempered love of life, between self-fulfilment and self-destruction. In the premiere it was clear that the lady of the camellias retains a residue of emotional and moral autonomy in spite of her dependency on men.
Amélie Niermeyer is committed to a form of spoken theatre that comes from the actor’s point of view. At her – very successful – start as the manager at Freiburg, she gathered together an outstanding company of actors, she opened her first season with William Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and produced the lovers’ mix-ups in the Athenian Forest as a light comedy with strong images. It once again became clear that he great strength lies in actors’ theatre that atmospherically involves the audience. Whereas she produced “Midsummer Night’s Dream” rather conventionally and without strong interventions in the text, at the end of her first Freiburg season she went a completely different way. She heavily cut Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, omitted whole scenes and produced a fragmentary philosophical comedy as though she were working on a reconciliation between deconstruction and narrative theatre. Amélie Niermeyer appraoched the play very freely by her standards, but told the central story in a linear fashion and mainly dealt with the flight of Rosalind and Celia and the androgynous disguise game in the Forest of Arden with its promises of love and trysts. The whole thing took place in a flokati half-pipe, in which love becomes a rollercoaster ride.
In her last season at Freiburg, Amélie Niermeyer tackled a stage adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, placing the audience on the revolving stage of the large auditorium as passengers on a ship. At this point, several of the bigger theatres in Germany were courting her to become their artistic director, and she finally accepted an offer from the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus. In her farewell to Freiburg, she staged Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” as women wavering between hysteria and melancholy, depicting abrupt transitions from weariness to exuberant activity and setting Chekhov’s bitterest phrases in space like glittering solitaire diamonds.
She is taking “Three Sisters” with her as part of her first season in Düsseldorf (2006/2007), where she is now in charge of a venue dedicated solely to theatre after working in an environment at Freiburg where drama, opera and dance coexist within the same building. In her debut schedule, she has programmed her own version of Elias Canetti’s “The Marriage” and the premiere of a new play by Thomas Jonigk. For this first Düsseldorf season, Amélie Niermeyer is bringing together directors as various as Stefan Bachmann, Luc Perceval, Sebastian Baumgarten and Stephan Rottkamp, as well as choosing some surprising themes with her mix of classics, premieres and a large proportion of projects in which theatre groups like Rimini Protokoll explore urban spaces and ways of life.
