I love change, being different
Peter Simonischek plays many different characters
“I love change, being different from role to role”, says Peter Simonischek. Irrespective of whether he plays Everyman, one of Schiller’s heroes or a comedian through and through, Simonischek is convincing in an astonishing variety of figures. He can cause outbursts of laughter and his audiences can also be deeply moved. He is fascinating as a gentleman of the old Viennese School, as a desperate petit-bourgeois and as an incorruptible proletarian, as one of Chekhov’s wavering figures or as someone anchored very much in today’s world and who suddenly loses his hold on life. Nevertheless Peter Simonischek always asserts his own very unmistakeable personality.
Peter Simonischek is a star actor in the
German-speaking world
He is a virile actor, the epitome of a strong man. He has found his own way of portraying Everyman, continuing the great tradition of Attila Hörbiger, for instance, whom Max Reinhardt referred to as his most convincing Everyman. In the role of Everyman Simonischek soon re-conquered his former homeland and confirmed his position among Austria’s leading actors. As a star on Peter Stein’s legendary Schaubühne in Berlin, which Simonischek describes as his “lost paradise”, he created fantastic characters directed by the most important stage directors of his time but in Austria his superb acting qualities were only known to connoisseurs.
His talent for getting the most varied of characters under his belt was immediately exploited at the Burgtheater where he is now a member of the ensemble. He was the delightfully comic and superior emperor in Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn; the weak, endangered station master Hudetz in Horváth’s Der jüngste Tag and in Albert Ostermaier’s Letzter Aufruf the strange recluse, who experiences closeness as a threat and therefore has his girlfriend killed. He was very convincing in Hofmannsthal’s Der Unbestechliche, and in Jon Fosse’s Traum im Herbst played a character who oscillates between this world and the next.
Many of these roles demanded a coming to terms with dying, the awareness of the merciless loneliness of people as they die. Simonischek recently portrayed what incredible things can suddenly occur in life in one of his most sensational characterisations – the architect Martin in Albee’s Die Ziege oder Wer ist Sylvia? – a successful, modern man whom the god Pan robs of all reason. Here Simonischek unifies distress, rapture, the attempt not to hurt anyone and intense loneliness in an exciting, indeed shattering human picture.
Karin Kathrein
