Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 1992-2017. The end of the GDR gave rise to new artistic freedoms in reunited Berlin. Shortly after the fall of the Wall, rebel director Frank Castorf was appointed artistic director of the Volksbühne. His way of working altered the public’s perception of this theater. The chronological history of the Castorf era between 1992 and 2017 is told here in excerpts from the productions and in a series of conversations conducted on the long sofa in the theater's foyer.

Partisan: Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 1992-2017

For a quarter of a century, Frank Castorf has created a microcosm in the Volksbühne that many considered to be an identity-forming fortress and a renegade island in the increasingly chic and monotonous centre of the capital. The marathon productions for which he was responsible were true orgies of association that demanded everything from the audience. The film accompanies Castorf's final season and is there when the theatre people get together once more to start a last fireworks display in the face of an uncertain future.

Macht das alles einen Sinn? Und wenn ja: Warum dauert es so lange?

Frank Castorf’s staging of the Ring, premiered in 2013 and filmed in 2016, provoked controversy right from the beginning. For Castorf, the Rheingold of our days is oil; thus he places the first part of the tetralogy at a gas station on Route 66. Die Walküre is situated in Baku, Azerbaijan, which was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1920 for its oil, whereas Siegfried takes place in a socialist equivalent of Mount Rushmore and at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Götterdämmerung is set somewhere in the GDR, ending up at New York’s stock exchange. Whilst Castorf’s staging polarized, Marek Janowski’s musical reading was unanimously praised, as was the excellent cast including in this opera Iain Paterson (Wotan), Nadine Weissmann (Erda), Albert Dohmen (Alberich) and Roberto Saccà (Loge).