Nicolas Stemann / Thalia Theater
Attacking classics from the repertoire as well as contemporary writings, with a predilection for that of Elfriede Jelinek, Nicolas Stemann tackles dramatic texts with a constantly renewed passion. Every new project is an occasion for him to pose new questions on the theatre form, with the aim of finding the best means of deploying the energy specific to each work. A pianist at his beginnings, working for the theatre as much as the opera, Nicolas Stemann has built his director's language with the rigor and subtleness that all musicians have. It is as the conductor of a loyal troupe of collaborators (actors, musicians, a video-maker, a set designer and a playwright) that he shapes his shows, never hesitating to be physically present on stage to give the performance its tempo. In 2002, he attracted attention with a particularly free staging of Hamlet in Hanover, which led to his being regularly invited by the major German-speaking theatre ensembles, such as the Burgtheater of Vienna or the Thalia Theater of Hamburg. Then, with Schiller's The Robbers (2008), he started to use a very musical approach to the play's text, considering it above all a score, through this even freeing himself from the constraint of characters. Each of his stagings is the occasion to invent a new and iconoclastic way for the actors to take possession of the text and communicate it to the public. That of the Festival d'Avignon discovered him in 2012 with The Merchant's Contracts. An Economic Comedy by Elfriede Jelinek, with whom he has been working on a regular basis since The Works in 2004.
MS, April 2013.