For me theatre is a kind of experiment
Tankred Dorst as Guest Author at the Salzburg Festival
Marcel Reich-Ranicki once referred to the dramatist Tankred Dorst, guest author at this year’s Salzburg Festival, as a “man of the theatre”. There’s hardly any other author writing in the German language to whom this term more eminently applies. Born in Sommerlind in Thuringia (Germany) in 1925, he has written innumerable full-length and one-act plays, libretti, translations and film scripts over the past 50 years. He has himself produced many of his own plays, and he has recorded for posterity his experience in the theatre in the form of essays, briefings and interviews.
Tankred Dorst presents his work at the
Salzburg Festival
Tankred Dorst’s work for the theatre began in Munich, where he started studying in the early 1950s. He began writing pieces and adapting classics for Munich’s puppet theatre, Das Kleine Spiel, but he soon realized that this art form was too limited for his talent, and he began to devote himself to the more spacious stage. In 1959 he was awarded the Mannheim National Theatre’s Young Authors Prize. His one-act play, Die Kurve (The Curve), had been performed on various stages in Germany before the breakthrough finally came in the early 1960s with Große Schmähreden an der Stadtmauer (Invective at the City Wall). This was followed by a number of other works, including Toller (Toller), Ich, Feuerbach (I, Feuerbach) and Die Schattenlinie (Shadow Line). The work that finally brought him international renown was Merlin oder Das wüste Land (Merlin, or The Waste Land), which was first produced in Düsseldorf by Jaroslav Chundela in 1981.
Characteristic of Tankred Dorst’s work is his juxtaposing of imagination and reality. Most of his source materials derive from fairytales and myths, which he sees as providing the basic pattern of all human relationships. At the same time, Dorst is a sharp observer of the times he lives in. Again and again he treats current affairs, often employing really existing persons as models for his characters. In the final analysis, all his works centre on the same, the only significant, question: “How should we live and act?”
Tankred Dorst has been working with his partner, Ursula Ehler, since the beginning of the 70s. Dorst sees this as a “symbiotic relationship”, for they work out scenarios with each other and then go through them together. He has received a number of illustrious awards for his work, the most prestigious of which are the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (1983), the Müllheim Dramatists Prize (1989), and the Georg Büchner Prize (1990).
Ruth Bader
TANKRED
DORST READS TANKRED DORST
together with Ursula Ehler • Texts and dialogues
31 July, 11 a.m.
Landestheater
BEGINNINGS
Markus Hille, Dirk Laucke, Ulrike Freising and Frank Conrad as guests of Tankred Dorst
1 August, 11 a.m.
Landestheater
MERLIN, OR THE WASTE LAND
2 August, 6 p.m.
Landestheater
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