Wolfgang Borchert Theater

Wolfgang Borchert Theater in the building on Hafenweg, which was used until 2014

Wolfgang Borchert Theater in Flechtheimspeicher

The Wolfgang-Borchert-Theater is a professional private theater in Münster ( Westphalia ) with its own permanent ensemble, consisting of around nine actors, supplemented by around nine guest actors. It was founded on December 29, 1956 and is one of the oldest private theaters in Germany.

history

The theater was officially opened in 1956 as a theater in a small room on Münster's Prinzipalmarkt . In 1958 the theater moved under the direction of Hans-Louis Metelmann with the artist community Die Schanze to the Münster main station and was now called Zimmer Theater Münster .

With the 1978/79 season Wolfgang Trautwein became director, who on the occasion of the 25th anniversary in 1982/1983 programmatically renamed the theater after the German writer Wolfgang Borchert into Wolfgang Borchert Theater .

From 1986 to 1996 director Wolfgang Rommerskirchen shaped the theater by placing the focus of the program on new German drama and many world premieres. He was followed by Heinz-Rudolf Müller from 1996 to 1999, under whose direction the move to the current venue on Hafenweg in the port of Münster , where the theater moved into the former administrative building of a dairy. Ewa Teilmans took over the management of the theater in 1999 and managed the theater with artistic success until 2006. After that, she moved to the city of Aachen as a director.

When the Cologne director and actor Meinhard Zanger took over the management in the 2006/07 season, the sharpening of the artistic profile of a literary-oriented chamber theater and the economic renovation began. A mix of idiosyncratic classic productions and contemporary pieces characterize the program. On 31 August 2006, with the staging of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett with the WBT_MAGAZIN opened a second permanent venue with 75 seats, which gives room for experimentation, this has disappeared again with the move to the Flechtheim- / Rhenus memory. The WBT_SAAL as the main venue has a capacity of 146 seats in the new Flechtheim- / Rhenusspeicher.

The Wolfgang Borchert Theater is financed by the Association for the Promotion of the Wolfgang Borchert Theater e. V. as legal entity and through grants from the city of Münster, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe . The annual budget for 2008 was around 940,000 euros , since 2009 around 1 million euros and remained roughly unchanged with the exception of 2012 (1.75 million euros).

The play “ A Midsummer Night's Dream ” by William Shakespeare , which will be performed by the Wolfgang Borchert Theater in the Gasometer from May 4, 2012 , received a budget of around three quarters of a million euros. At the end of 2011, the LWL-Kulturstiftung provided 150,000 euros to support the play, and the city of Münster provided 75,000 euros from the profit distribution from Sparkasse Münsterland-Ost. The two scenes, the Athens market square and the Athens forest, were separated by the set design. The audience was first led through a labyrinth to the scene of the first act, then through another labyrinth into the Athens Forest, where a grandstand with 414 seats was waiting for them. The 33 performances initially planned were quickly sold out. 13 additional screenings as well as the previews and the media call were sold out and resulted in a 100% occupancy rate. With the in-house performances in the harbor, the occupancy rate was 94% and resulted in the theater's most successful season overall. During Meinhard Zanger's seven-year directorship , the debts were reduced to a remainder of 50,000 euros. All of the 46th performances were sold out, including the last one, which was performed on July 8, 2012, so that a total of 20,299 spectators attended the performances. Over 20,000 additional spectators saw performances in the Theater am Hafen, so that a total of around 41,000 spectators were counted in the record season.

The Wolfgang Borchert Theater moved from the north to the south side of the harbor to the Flechtheim- / Rhenusspeicher in autumn 2014 , as it had become too small for the high number of visitors. The foyer of the theater was set up in the Flechtheimspeicher.