Theater people are night owls. If a director schedules a premiere at five in the morning, that’s unusual and, in the case of Barbara Frey, certainly also a tribute to the former miners in the district who started the early shift in the mines in the Ruhr area at this time. Where compressors, generators and accumulators used to roar, there is now music by Ravel: The Ruhrtriennale begins this Saturday with a “concert at dawn” in the Zweckel machine hall in Gladbeck, followed by breakfast with the spectators outdoors. No opening speech that supports the state as usual, no fanfare – it is a deliberately quiet prelude that focuses on musical enjoyment and human encounters. A tentative approach of the Swiss Barbara Frey, who has never been too loud anyway, to her new field of activity and audience.
The first director of the Schauspielhaus Zürich
In the evening, the 58-year-old will also hand in her business card as a director. She stages Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Downfall of the House of Usher”, a dark story of decay that Frey stages between the monsters of the Zweckel-Halle – possibly a parable of our pandemic times. The atmospheric adaptation of literary texts appropriate to the work, especially from the canon of high culture, and their (spoken) musical exploration is something like Frey’s trademark. At the Schauspielhaus Zürich, where she was the first woman in the history of the house for ten years until 2019, she staged the story “Die Toten” by James Joyce as a farewell. This was also a witching hour, not a final blast. She brings this important evening to her Ruhrtriennale program.
The artistic director, born in Basel in 1963, was appointed because of her “leadership skills and ability to work in a team”, and because she had shown in Zurich that “she stands for an open, curious and lively theater at the highest level”, was the name of her presentation in 2019. Three years Barbara Frey will now lead the Ruhrtriennale until 2023. The cultural festival founded by the visionary Gerard Mortier in 2002 takes place in the old coking plants and industrial halls between Bochum, Duisburg and Essen and, with a budget of 16 million euros, is one of the largest in Germany.
She came to the theater through music, as a drummer in a rock band
It was canceled last year, officially because of Corona, but the assumption that the cancellation was also related to the unpleasant director Stefanie Carp is not so absurd. Carp had messed up with many, in their first year by being invited by the band Young Fathers, which sympathizes with the Israeli-critical movement BDS, in 2020 because of the polarizing Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe as the planned keynote speaker. For many, Carp’s program was too performance-heavy, fragmented and intellectual.
There shouldn’t be such a hassle with the reluctant, reliably prudent successor. Barbara Frey is considered to be strong-willed, persistent and focused, but she is neither a system blower nor – as a director – a piece wrecking. She also does not interfere in current debates. The word “solid” describes the way you run a theater best. She likes the classics, draws strength from the calm, also loves the quiet moments, the concentration, in her productions.
That’s amazing in that she’s actually a drummer. Frey started out as a drummer in a rock band, wrote lyrics and came to the theater through music. Since her directorial debut in 1993, she has worked at all major theaters in German-speaking countries, be it at the Berlin Schaubühne, the Munich Residenztheater or the Vienna Burgtheater. Several of her musically sophisticated productions have been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, and Frey is always in discussion when a larger artistic director needs to be cast. The Ruhrtriennale will only be a stopover on her career path through the male domain of theater.