Andreas Kriegenburg / Kammerspiele Munich
Originally from the former German Democratic Republic, Andreas Kriegenburg, after studying carpentry, decided to join the theatre of his native city, Magdeburg, believing that it was a place of possible freedom for him. He was a technician there, before becoming, at 21, assistant to the director in 1984 in Zittau then in Frankfurt an der Oder. It was there that he staged his first play in 1988. After the fall of the wall, he went to Berlin and the Volksbühne from 1991 to 1996. His path led him to the Schauspiel in Hanover then to the illustrious Burgtheater of Vienna, which he left in 2001 to become the principal director of the Thalia Theater of Hamburg. Today, he is the Haussregisseur, the associate artist, of the Deutsches Theater of Berlin. During all these years, he crossed Greek tragedy, the theatre of Shakespeare and Chekhov, as well as the contemporary German and European theatre. His collaboration with Dea Loher permitted him to present about 10 plays by this author, which have been very successful, especially so for the most recent production Diebe (Thieves) in January 2010. His work expresses an aesthetic search of great quality, but also his curiosity for texts from other forms that he adapts for the theatre. This is the case for Der Prozess (The Trial) by Kafka that he staged at the invitation of the Kammerspiele of Munich, one of the major acting ensembles of the German theatre, invited this year for the first time to the Festival d'Avignon, like Andreas Kriegenburg.
The Trial is one of the posthumous works that Franz Kafka (1893-1924) did not complete, written between 1914 and 1917 but only published in 1925, a year after his death, by his friend Max Brod who went against Franz Kafka's wishes in his last will and testament. Made up of parts and pieces, The Trial is a kind of literary puzzle that, with The Castle, Metamorphosis (the only text published during the author's lifetime) and Amerika, are part of the major texts of a writer who invented a unique style that was not lacking in humour to recount the anxieties and incomprehension of man in the daily life of a world that isolates and worries him, a cold and oppressive world.
JFP, April 2010