Stéphane Braunschweig
Georg Büchner and Bertolt Brecht are the first two authors that Stéphane Braunschweig staged after studying philosophy and training at the École du Théâtre National de Chaillot, directed by Antoine Vitez. This attraction for dramaturgical writings from Germany never deserted him since he subsequently took an interested on several occasions in Kleist and Wedekind. As time went on, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Molière and Ibsen also became his preferred authors: as different as they are, what they have in common and what is particularly important to him is their sceptical relationship to the world. From this viewpoint, Pirandello, already tackled in 2006 with Clothing the Naked, is fully ranked among them. Stéphane Braunschweig's interest in the great texts does not prevent him from turning towards contemporary writing: he has staged Olivier Py, Hanokh Levin and more recently Arne Lygre, for whom he premiered two plays last season at La Colline. Director and stage designer, he needs to fully enter into contact with a text, to imagine it in a space, most often abstract but whose transformations and developments are a path to the deep structures of the writing. He believes that performing a play again does not mean elucidating or explaining it but, by highlighting what is clear in it, permitting the spectator to access the dark areas of the text, the questions it conceals, its complexity. Very early on in his career, he worked for the opera, from Bartók to Mozart, from Debussy to Verdi, from Beethoven to Berg, by way of Wagner, the four parts of whose Ring cycle he presented at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence from 2006 to 2009. He was the first director of the Centre dramatique d'Orléans, before being appointed the head of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg and its school, which he directed from 2000 to 2008. Since 2010, he has headed the national theatre La Colline, where he succeeded Alain Françon. He presented Amphitryon by Kleist at the Festival d'Avignon in 1994.
JFP, April 2012