With a youthful lack of respect, he found the first victim for this contemporary cleaning at the start of his directorial career in the late 1990s. Stemann reduced Goethe’s “Werther” and “Torquato Tasso” to basic elements and robbed them of their reverence with video inserts, the atmosphere of flat shares or symbolic gestures. In the “Tasso” project, Goethe himself was on the stage every evening, as a plaster bust smashed on the floor – so much for the rebellious pose
But Stemann then developed a complex and very musical way of acting from the shards of the classic, which then deals with modern problems of understanding with various inserted plays and theatrical media. The modern individual, who is responsible for himself alone without ideological support and experiences this as excessive demands, is at the heart of most of these mosaics.
Stemann’s most well-known production, the adaptation of “Hamlet” at Schauspiel Hanover, which was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen in 2002, portrays a media prince who disintegrates due to “Anything Goes” more than treachery. Philipp Hochmair, who plays the leading role in many Stemann productions, loses himself as Hamlet between media pictures that surround him and a court that views guilt very casually with merry helplessness.
In his best productions, the lack of tragedy often seen in Stemann productions refers to the fact that the prettification of fear and the lack of commitment in contemporary society are the devil’s freedoms. The apparent openness of our society remains a deceptive comfort when the moral values that make orientation possible in the first place blur.
The fact that the prettification that he wants to portray is also perceived as his aesthetic (especially when using fashionable media such as video, music, pop tools) occasionally resulted in the accusation of superficiality. At the same time this highly effective means of production is certainly no obstacle for his great success.
Stemann, who comes from a highly productive generation of Hamburg director students (Falk Richter, Sandra Strunz and Matthias von Hartz studied with him), is now one of the most in-demand young directors and produces everywhere from the Deutsches Theater in Berlin to the Burgtheater in Vienna.
In the Akademitheater there, a production of Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Work” originated in 2003 that demonstrated in the best way possible Stemann’s qualities when dealing with complex texts. Using the wordy text about man’s disastrous handling of nature using the example of the Kaprun barrage, Stemann developed a sensitive, scenic collage that show irony in its critical tradition. Stemann used a large chorus of workers, a cannibal mountain man, young debaters and hysterical girls to turn Jelinek’s indictment into an acidic spectacle.
However, Stemann’s contradictions also mean that the quality of productions can vary greatly. As someone who argues from a moral standpoint without banishing the showmanship from his productions, who likes to combat the inability to love with kitsch and sometimes takes the spirit of the texts too seriously and sometimes ignores it completely, Stemann swings from brilliance to superficiality and back again. An embarrassing reconstruction of Brecht Theatre with “The Threepenny Opera” in Hanover is just a few weeks apart from a “Katherine of Heilbronn” as a lightweight pop fairy story in Berlin and the gardening joys of Jelinek’s text landscapes. But the theatre can only benefit from such daring and that is why Stemann is rightly one of the most important young directors in contemporary theatre.
