theater glassbooth

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theater glassbooth is a German off-theater that is primarily active in the Rhine-Ruhr region . The project without its own venue and without a permanent ensemble was founded in 2003 by Jens Dornheim and Gordon Stephan and made a name for itself by staging rarely performed pieces with sometimes off-the-wall or abysmal themes. Even black humor is in theater glass booth is an important aspect, also are often found references to cinematic.

history

The founders Jens Dornheim and Stephan Gordon met as students at the University of Essen , where they played in an English-speaking theater group. After this group broke up, both agreed that they wanted to continue doing theater, and in 2003 they founded their own theater project that would play literary theater, but should be more than just a student theater and stand out from the conventional theater canon.

The first piece selected was The Man in the Glass Booth by British actor and writer Robert Shaw . The little-known piece had never been performed in Germany and therefore had to be translated into German first. In October 2004 it premiered in Essen under the title Der Mann im Glaskasten . The grotesque about a supposed former SS-Obersturmbannführer (loosely based on Adolf Eichmann ), who lives disguised as a Jew in New York , but is then arrested by the Israeli secret service and brought to justice, was one for the young theater group around Dornheim and Stephan great success and received a detailed, positive review in the taz . The eponymous glass case made of bulletproof glass, in which the accused must sit in the courtroom, also gave the theater project its name: theater glassbooth.

Inspired by the success of the first play, the founders decided to stage a new play every year from now on. This was followed by Patrick Marber's relationship drama Hautnah ( Closer ), the psychological thriller This Story of You by John Hopkins , and Kubus ( The Cube ), an experimental piece based on a little-known television play by Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl . After this production, co-founder Gordon Stephan left the project and moved to Berlin . Jens Dornheim continued to run theater glassbooth, so that in the following years new pieces were presented with changing cast and direction and guest performances were given on various stages in the Ruhr area , in Düsseldorf and in Cologne .

This was followed in 2014 with Container Love , a black satire on the media landscape and especially on the TV show Big Brother , the group's first self-written piece, which was awarded the 2015 Petra Meurer Theatertage special prize .

In the run-up to the Luther Year 2017, theater glassbooth 2016 showed the rarely shown play Luther by the British playwright John Osborne . The piece was the group's greatest public success and was invited by the Lessing Museum to Kamenz, Saxony - the ensemble's longest journey to date.

In 2018 the theater glassbooth (now a registered association ) celebrated its 15th anniversary. A book about the history of theater glassbooth and a documentary film were also published. Karl Schönherr's drama Der Weibsteufel was also brought to the stage as part of the anniversary, but the plot was moved from the Alpine region to the Ruhr area in the 1920s. The play was nominated for the 22nd Heidelberg Theater Prize.

In 2019, Willems Wilde Welt was the group’s second in-house production.

Pieces

Venues

Regular venues for the theater glassbooth are the Theater im Depot in Dortmund, the Schauburg Filmpalast in Gelsenkirchen, the Rottstrasse 5 Theater in Bochum as well as the Neue Galerie Gladbeck and the Magazin in Gladbeck.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ taz NRW, October 30, 2004: Between sweat and absurdity