How Iris Laufenberg, new director at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, wants to do world theater – and is facing headwinds.
This woman aims high with her theater, at least that’s what the title of her opening premiere suggests: Iris Laufenberg opened her directorship at the Deutsches Theater Berlin last weekend with the four-hour evening “Weltall Erde Mensch”, named after a youth non-fiction book from the GDR era. That sounded like an all-encompassing world theater claim, like urbi et orbi. However, director Alexander Eisenach’s production was a complete failure. There was still “a lot of room for improvement,” it was said jokingly in the friendlier reviews, while the harsher ones said something about “a total artistic failure.” The second premiere, “Prima Facie”, a monologue about sexual violence, apparently couldn’t make up for the poor first impression.