The actor, director and long-time acting director of the Dortmund Theater Michael Gruner is dead. Like the theater on his Homepage reports, Gruner died last Wednesday at the age of 76.
Gruner was a classic representative and co-designer of the German city and ensemble theater, a man more of the second tier, but very active, patent and highly valued there. Gruner, born on January 1, 1945 in Falkenstein, Vogtland, began working as an actor at the Darmstadt State Theater in 1965, influenced by the poetic theater of the director Hans Bauer. In 1966 he was one of the four actors in Claus Peymann’s scandalous world premiere of Peter Handke’s “Public Insult” at the Frankfurt TAT. From 1970-1972 he was a member of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus ensemble, where he made his directorial debut with Büchner’s “Woyzeck”. Since then he has worked as a director, first in Darmstadt under the management of Günther Beelitz, then from 1976 back in Düsseldorf, where he returned with Beelitz. In 1980 he was engaged as a regular guest director at the Hamburg Thalia Theater. Gruner also staged at the Munich Residenztheater and at the Schauspiel Frankfurt, was senior director in Stuttgart and a guest at the Vienna Burgtheater as well as at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. There his staging of Tankred Dorst’s turnaround piece “Herr Paul” (1994) with old Kurt Böwe in the title role became a stage hit.
Gruner was a literary thinker and proactive director, the text formed the basis of his theater. For a long time he was particularly interested in the poets of Expressionism. The Dortmund Theater, where he was acting director from 1999 to 2010, did not attract much artistic attention under his leadership – it was only his successor Kay Voges that attracted national attention – but Gruner is said to have been very popular on a human level, both in the house and in the city . Most recently he staged at smaller theaters such as the Nestroyhof Hamakom in Vienna, where in March, while still in lockdown, he worked on the war drama “Autumn of the Subjects” by Nino Harativili. Michael Gruner will no longer experience the live premiere postponed to January 2022 due to the pandemic.