The Omsk State Drama Theater (main stage)
The Schaubühne Theater (Germany)
"Request Concert" F. Kroetz
Directed by Thomas Ostermeier
Featuring Anne Tismer
The Schaubühne Theater was established in Berlin in 1970 by a renowned director Peter Stein.
Thomas Ostermeier is one of the most brilliant European theater directors. He managed to build probably the most successful career than anyone of his generation. He studied in Ernst-Busch theater school, where he met a Russian professor Gennady Bogdanov, who was teaching Meyerhold's system of biomechanics. As he would say later, this meeting was fundamental to his career in theater. Until 1999 Ostermeier was running a small theater called "Baracke" that became very popular under his management. In 2000 he and a choreographer Sasha Waltz (Sasha Waltz's production "The Alley of Astronauts" was performed on stage during Days of German Culture festival in 1998) headed The Schaubühne Theater in Berlin. Since that time, The Schaubühne has become a place for risky experiments and hot arguments. It also hosts European festivals of contemporary drama.
In 2000 Thomas Ostermeier was awarded the European Theatre Prize ("New Theatrical Realities").
The "Request Concert" was a remarkable event at the Festival d'Avigno in 2004. It also became a laureate of many other European theater festivals.
Review
Out of nowhere Ostermeier brings a singer, whose song is playing on the radio, into the dense atmosphere on stage. She is trying to reach out to the heroine, sings about love, misery and passion - everything this big world has to offer and everything mademoiselle Rush is deprived of, living in her tiny apartment. In the final scene she is desperately trying to get some sleep. Reads a book, drinks water. Closes the bathroom window. Checks the taps. Then finds sleeping pills. Carefully swallows one and washes it down. Spills the rest on the table. Studies them closely with her weak-sighted eyes. Swallows one more, then another. A lonely silhouette is sitting at the table, barely holding on the chair. Light begins to blur and fades away. Somewhere in one of those tiny apartments another lonely mademoiselle has died. Another lost soul vanished in the ocean of this cold universe.
Olga Eroshina. Avignon, 2004
http://www.newizv.ru/news/?id_news=8615&date=2004-07-28
Thomas Ostermeier shows an everyday rut, that's been perfected during one's meaningless lonely life. Every gesture of the main character is as precise and accurate as it is sad and desperate. The production is clever and startling. Ann Tismer's acting is so brilliant that you lose your breath and start thinking: "Oh my God, I cannot believe I'm like that!"