Jörg Menke-Peitzmeyer

Jörg Menke-Peitzmeyer (born June 15, 1966 in Anröchte , Lippstadt district , North Rhine-Westphalia ) is a German playwright and actor . He is one of the best-known German-speaking authors for children's and youth theater .

Life

Menke-Peitzmeyer studied acting at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1986 to 1990 and worked as an actor in Mainz , Gießen , at the theater on Kurfürstendamm and at the Schlossparktheater in Berlin as well as in Stendal and Coburg . He has also been seen in various TV roles. From 1998 to 2002 he took up a second course in dramatic writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig . His thesis was the monologue Der Manndecker , which was premiered during his studies and which is now also available as a script . As a trained actor, Menke-Peitzmeyer played this piece again and again. Commissioned works for the Theater der Altmark in Stendal, the Theater Freiberg , the Grips-Theater Berlin and the Schlosstheater Moers followed.

Menke-Peitzmeyer won a. a. the 2006 State Theater Prize for Authors and the Bavarian Theater Prize 2007. In 2016, he won the German Youth Theater Prize .

plant

A special focus in Menke-Peitzmeyer's work are pieces for children and youth theater . However, he himself emphasized in an interview that “no distinction should be made between adult and youth theater”. Typical of his pieces is the combination of serious themes and unsentimental, sometimes humorous presentation. His theatrical works include u. a. with topics such as eating disorders ( Der Essotiger ), illness and death ( you see ghosts ; Miriam, all in black ), youth poverty ( poor, but sexy ) or bullying at school ( first lesson ).

Another thematic focus is sport, in particular football . One of Menke-Peitzmeyer's most successful football pieces, the classroom piece Get up if you're Schalke , was performed in various versions in several countries and translated into English, Croatian, Serbian and Chinese. However, the portrayal of sport itself is never the main concern of the pieces, but forms the background against which the dramatic conflicts take place.

In March 2009, Mandy - Im Tal der Ahnungslosen , a play about German-German family stories at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, premiered in Stuttgart. The piece - a work commissioned by the Junge Ensemble Stuttgart for the 20th year of the fall of the Berlin Wall - reports on the excursion of the young East German girl Mandy to the Swabian provinces and deals with common East-West clichés in a humorous way.

His most recent commissioned work is the football tabloid The Red Devil , which was written for the Koblenz Theater and premiered there on February 21, 2010. Menke-Peitzmeyer describes the content of the comedy in an interview:

“A player from TuS [Koblenz] wants to switch to his arch rival - to Kaiserslautern. To prevent this, before he can meet the FCK people at the Hunsrück motorway service station, he is kidnapped by the president and coach of the TuS and kept hidden in the presidential villa. And then all the mechanisms of tabloid comedy come into play, there are secret relationships, the president's daughter also plays a certain role. A journalist also shows up and smells the story of his life. "

Plays

• Der Manndecker (Premiere April 6, 2000, Theater am Volkspark Halle)
• Get up if you are a Schalke (premiere September 30, 2005, Landestheater Burghhofbühne Dinslaken; published in: Taube, Gerd (ed.): 55 monologues for children's and youth theater. Texts and songs for auditioning, studying and getting to know each other. Henschel Verlag 2008; Jemacka citanka / Deutsches Lesebuch / German Reader. Seven theater texts by German authors for children and young people. Theater Epicenter and Goethe-Institut Croatia, Zagreb 2008.)
• Relegation battle (premiere May 3, 2006, Sensemble Theater Augsburg)
• First hour (premiere October 4, 2006, Theater der Altmark Stendal - commissioned work)
• Disco theater (premiere 23 November 2006, Central Saxon Theater Freiberg - commissioned work)
• B-Jugend (premiere March 22, 2007, Grips Theater Berlin - commissioned work)
• The Essotiger (premiere May 22, 2007, Gostner Hoftheater Nürnberg)
• You see ghosts (premiere September 28, 2007, Ingolstadt Theater)
• Poor but sexy (premiere November 8, 2007, Schlosstheater Moers - commissioned work)
• Miriam, all in black (premiere January 20, 2012, Theater Biel-Solothurn)
• Golden Foul (no UA yet)
• The Nude Cleaner ( Premiere November 27, 2010, Nordharzer Städtebundtheater Halberstadt / Quedlinburg)
• Mandy - In the Valley of the Clueless (WP March 20, 2009 Young Ensemble Stuttgart (JES) - commissioned work)
• Wechselfieber (premiere February 21, 2010 Theater Koblenz, under the title "Der Rote Teufel", commissioned work)

Scholarships and Awards

• Scholarship Paul Maar (2004)
• Nomination for the German Youth Theater Prize for Stand Up If You're Schalke (2006)
• Prize for authors of the state theaters for the play First Hour (2006)
• Bavarian Theater Prize (Best Youth Play ) for Der Essotiger (2007)
• Nomination for the authors' award of the Badische Landesbühne Bruchsal for Miriam, all in black (2008)
• Scholarship from the German Youth Theater Prize, funded by the Federal Ministry of Youth, for I am a good father (2008)
• Nomination for the 10th German Children's and Youth Theater Meeting “Wait a minute! 2009 " for I am a good father (2008)
• Funding by the child and youth film funding of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media and the Board of Trustees for Young German Films for the script project Billy the beast (2008)
• Project grant from the state of Baden-Württemberg for a play development together with the Offenburg theater BAAL novo for Türkiye'ye Hos Geldiniz / Welcome to Turkey (2010)
• German youth theater award for his play The Working Dead. Hard Work (2016)

Trivia

Menke-Peitzmeyer actively played soccer in the district class and is a supporter of Borussia Dortmund . In an interview, he cited the book Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby as the “initial spark” for his theater literary preoccupation with football .

Web links

• Who plays theater does not murder - article by the taz about a performance of relegation battle by prisoners of the Siegburg prison, from January 28, 2008
• The Taste of Life - Interview by the Donau Kurier with Jörg Menke-Peitzmeyer about the play You see ghosts , from September 24, 2007

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The man marker returns . New press Coburg. August 15, 2007. Retrieved April 18, 2018.
2. ↑ As in an interview with Nürnberg extra  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   (PDF).
3. ↑ Serious issues are tackled in a comedic way . New press Coburg. August 25, 2007. Retrieved April 18, 2018.
4. ↑ Description of the piece from the Verband Deutscher Bühnen- und Medienverlage e. V. (VDB).
5. ↑ Ostwind sweeps clichés off the table . Esslinger newspaper. March 24, 2009. Retrieved April 18, 2018.
6. ↑ Theater on German-German History - Report on Deutschlandradio Kultur on the world premiere of Mandy and the Junge Ensemble Stuttgart on March 19, 2009.
7. ↑ ^{a b} About the theater potential of TuS Koblenz - Interview with Jörg-Menke Peitzmeyer .
8. ↑ http://autorenfoerderpreis.de/bisherige ( Memento from February 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ official press release  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
10. ↑ http://www.theater.de/news/jugendtheaterpreis-baden-wuerttemberg-fuer-hanneke-paauwes-in-memoriam/  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.